Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (expanded ed.)

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Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration Expanded Edition

Tracy B. Strong

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Be rke ley . Los Ange les - London

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Copyrigbt C 1975. 19"1Iy Tbt Rtgmts rf tbt U"iwmry of Calif_ill M",b ofCbttpttr X flJ'PUlTJ ~Iy 111 '7r:tts 11M Prtlt:rU: RtjI«trrm Pmp«tiWm j" N~tr.sdJt." Political Theory. xm. tUl. 1 (MIIJ. 1965), 164-111. Pmrrissitm to nprilft if grtJttf~11y achIowkJgtd. LibrtJry

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I. Tith.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

and THE POLITICS OF TRANSFIGURATION

T h.1. ..

t

On_

I

To My Family

Abo I doubt if I could' ~ver become a true pbilologist; unless I become one by tb~ way, as if by accident. tbere is no bope for it. Tb~ misfortune is tbis: I bave no model and am in danger of making a fool of myself by my own band. - Nietzsche

to

Rohde. 1870

Sing me a new IOng. tbe world is transfigured and all tbe skies r~ioice . - Nietzsche

to

Cast , 1889

PREFACE The pages of this preface are, in a sense, not the beginn ing of this book, but only precisely what a preface is; it comes before and surveys what I have to say. I play here, perhaps, the role of guide, in no way a substitute for the journey itself, but sometimes able to point out in advance some of the landscapes, some sections of the city which may be of particular interest. I wish to take this preliminary opportun ity to overview some of the concerns and problems which Nietzsche raises, and which are raised for all students of Nietzsche by their study . In t he metaphor I borrow from Wittgenstein for use in chapter i, Nietzsche is a b it like a foreign city. Though it looks like all other cities, it is like none , and whatever knowledge we may have from previous ex perience will, very likely, be of little use in gening around . I h ave tried to write this book with as little animosity toward

other com mentators as possible. This has not always been easy; indeed , traces of the possessiveness I feel about my thoughts remain in some foo tnotes. I hope that such widersagen serves a useful purpose . Nietzsche, as anyone who has read him knows, is an author who engenders the most intense and personal feelings. All interpretations seem possible : between the racial enthusiasms of national socialism, the still encountered dedication of those trying to live, a la

f vii

viii 1

PREFACE

Demian , a "N ietzschean " life , the bright individualism of most Anglo-American imerpretations, and the dark cosmic mysteries offered by Continental philosophers, the new reader knows not where to tum . A ~ can be madc= for c=ach incc=rprc=tation. Gc=nc=raJly speaking, most incerprt:ters have found passages that, in context, do appear to support their understanding (though, from the quarrt:ls among Nietzsche scholars, one might suspect that ressentiment was a prert:quisite for admission to the guild). I deal specifically with somc= of thc= bc=st and standard interprc:tations in thc= coursc= of thc= book. In each case, I think that the imerprt:tations arc= not SO much wrong, as missing some elements of Nietzsche's thought which, if their authors were to takc= them sc=riously, would force=: them to cast thc=ir whoJc= analysis in a different light. Nietzsche is to some degree rt:sponsible for this, again as aU who havc= looked inco his works must realize. He doc=s not write in any of thc= standard philosophical forms , the creatisc= and the essay, nor evc=n in an older onc=, the dialogue . Instead , we havc= aphorisms, poc=try , vindicativc= , confc=ssions; whc=rc: thc= argumc=nt sc=c=ms morc: sustained, as perhaps in On the Genealogy of Morals, the coherence=: we feel is at best that of a musical composition , of an interior pattern repeatedly manifesting itself in different forms , always again new. I have cried in this book to take Nietzsche seriously and at the same time to make sense of all his claims. Most prt:vious interprt:ters havc=, I bdievc= . in their conviction that they undc=rstood Nic=tzsche, managed to blind thc=mselvc=s to what thc=y did not want or nc=ed to sc=e. I rt:alize that my claims to havc= partially avoidc=d such exegetical cecity may be presumptuous. Nietzsche warns his readers: "This is, in the end , my ordinary experience. and, if you will. the originality of my experience=:. Whoc=ver has believed he understood something of me, has made himsc=lf something of me in his own image - not rardy an opposite to me ... ; who has understood nothing of me , denied that I nc=eded to be considerc=d at all. " l My only justification for thc= claim that I have escaped his accusation must come in thc= writing that follows . I can indicate in advance that I was helped in my c=ndeavor by an almost accidental dc=cision, to takc= at face=: valuc= thosc= claims in Nietzsche which appc=ar thc= most histrionic and c=xasperating. Among thc=se are his demands for " master races " and "breeding," his assertions that hc= "brc=aks the world in [Wo ," and so forth . For many commemators, these form the fringe of Nietzsche's

PREfACE

I ix

megalomania. Such pronouncements get treated a bit in the condesending manner one would treat an interesting and imponanr person who had " spent too long a time in the bush" ; they are ignored, as not really part of civilized discourse. For me , however, Nietzsche must have had a reason for saying such things, and a reason beyond the rather feeble excuse of the "rhetoric of the times. " As an example ; it is sometimes claimed that we must be careful in interpreting what Nietzsche says in favor of war, since his experience of war in the nineteenth century was SO different from ours. Yet, Nietzsche speaks specifically of "wars such as no man has ever seen." It seems, then, that any interpretation of Nietzsche must deal with all the seemingly " unpleasant" sides of his teaching. Let me rehearse , then , what I have to say . I focus on Nietzsche's claim that Western culture, in all its aspectS, is coming ro an end. Though this process be not yet accomplished, for Nietzsche it will form the hisrory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries , centuries that he believes or hopes will be informed by his thought. Western culture has , Nietzsche argues, hollowed itself out, and men, the " last men," are left blinking in a world devoid of all meaning. This is what Nietzsche calls nihilism , that men continue to pursue in their lives and intelligence that which their intelligence and lives make impossible to anain . Contrary to those such as Marx , who also saw an era drawing to an end but hoped for the binh of a new world from the demise of the old , Nietzsche does not associate the advent of nihilism with the necessary birth of another world , but only with nothing. I draw in this work upon all of Nietzsche 's writings, but avoid chronological exegesis of them. It is my conviction , based on the demonstration of what follows , that Nietzsche's works are all (or almost all) of a piece. From his earliest writing, he remains concerned with questions of an ultimate and almost eschatological nature ; the meaning of truth , [he junifiability of c:xinence , the future of the human race. These sorts of areas, with their ancillary topics of inquiry , fonn consistent and ongoing problems for Nietzsche . His answers, if properly undersrood , must , I think , be faced . They are profound and explicit. and sound a continuous note throughout his philosophical activity . Nietzsche sees his first task as effectuating a diagnosis of present conditions which will permit men to make a break with their past.

x)

PREFACE

Our genealogy , the soil from which our "nature" springs, holds the rootS of the growth of nihilism. It has many subtle ways of retaining a grip on men, even, and perhaps especially, when they think themselves freed from it. By his critique, Nietzsche would present to mankind a picture of their lot such that it can be broken . This is no easy task : the first men whom Zarathustra tries to warn of their own existence laugh at him , and demand precisely that to which Zarathustra would aJert them. There is, then, a preliminary problem for Nietzsche: his "originality ," as he calls it . He will not be able simply to tell men what he has to say. The events he would make known still liI= beyond the language of most of his potentiallisteners.2 Nietzsche is not , as so many commentators have said, "obscure "; in fact, I think that he generally means exactly what he says. If we find him obscure or mystical, this says something about us, for it is not until we are able to cast off the pictures that hold us prisoner to a traditional way of seeing moral, political , social, and epistemological problems that we will be able to face directly what Nietzsche says. Here Nietzsche's task is preliminarily destructive. He essays a tractatus politicus to break the hold he sees in the structure of language and conceptual patterns, in the nature of moral interactions, and in our inheritance from Socrates and Christ. Men , says Nietzsche, do not want to be freed from their illusions, not because those illusions are "comforting," but because those illusions are all there is . If the illusions are broken , then there will be nothing. For Nietzsche, the ensuing chaos is a necessary risk ; it permits that all things be made new, but it does not ensure how they will be made, or that they will be made at all. Nothing can provide men with an example in the chaos which lies beyond the edge of nihilism. Not even ancient Greece, a culture often understood as Nietzsche's ideal, can be a model any longer. "We must ," he proclaims, "surpass even the Greeks ... 3 And, as we cannot go backward, we will also not naturally go forward: mankind is threatened with a folie circulaire, the madness of the compulsive repetition of a life void of meaning. Men are " human-all-too-human ." The faults and errors in so being human affect and infect everything men do: it is their nature to move into nihilism . If so, then there can be no answer but to change the very stuff of humanity , to eradicate that which makes men human-all-too-human and transfigure them into "overmen ." The

PREFACE

[xi

doctrine of eternal return and the lessons of the will to power form the center of Nietzsche's attempt to accomplish such a revaluation. This provides us with a clue to Nietzsche's so-called amorality. It is a mistake to thin k that Nietzsche criticizes morality. or politics , or any other traits of Western man , as "simply" illusions, which can be wiped away with bold words. His critique is of us, the men and women for whom that morality is not "childish" nonsense, but actual. Morality is real because of the sort of people we are. A critique of morality. or of politics. or religion, cannot stop with the institution or practice; for Nietzsche, it must continue on to the beings of whose life it is a necessary part. Nietzsche then forces us to know ourselves. Bm , contrary to much of later psychiatry, he does not think we can stop there . There is no reason that self-knowledge should be a satisfactory stopping point but now I do more than anticipate . What fo llows does, I hope , what I claim fo r it here. May it at least provoke a reader to the necessity of having to know such things. A version of chapter vii was printed in Nietzsche, edited by Robert Solomon, in the Doubleday Series in Modern Philosophy (New York : Doubleday. 1973). Permission to reprint it here is gratefu lly recognized . An early version of chapter vii was given at the Northeastern Political Science Association Meetings in 1970; portions of chapters vi and ix were given at the Columb ia Philosophy Colloquium in 1971 ; a portion of chapter viii was given at the University of Chicago Political Science Colloquium, 1973. I am gratefu l for the comments received on these occasions. The writing of an early draft of this book was partly supported by a Summer Research Grant from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970. Many thanks ro Linda Perkins for typing and other help . Though few of my friends and teachers are mentioned in the notes, the debts l owe them are together personal and intellectual j they cannot be repaid through the publication of this book . I was first instru cted in political theory, and shown the integrity of that vocation by John D. Lewis at Oberlin College. His recognition of something of merit in my obscure struggles with political thought and his encouragement remain a central motivation in my pursuits

xii J

PREFACE

since that time. At Oberlin, I also came to know Wilson Carey McWilliams, to whom lowe only that which one can owe to a teacher who has known how to break away from the ~ductiveness of that position and become a companion. The initiaJ writing of this book in the form of a dissertation was supervisc:d by Judith N. Shklar j when I look back upon that original manuscript , of which a word remains buried here and there in this presc:nt work , I can only marvel at what she put up with, and at the quiet and completely precise encouragement and assistance she gave. I should also mention here the understanding and example of Stanley Hoffmann, who, though not a political theorist, made my stay at Harvard much more productive than it would otherwise have been. The chapters of this ixMlk have been written and rewritten at the promptings of a number of friends . I should mention panicularly Timothy Gould, whose comments on the last chapter showed me what I meant to say; Alexander Nehamas, whose readings of chapters vi and ix forced me to rethink many inconsistencies; Roben Eden, who kept the picture of what I was trying to do always in front of me; Anne Kreilkamp, who prompted me on Wittgenstein and grace during a period when my ideas were beginning to take shape; and, last, Ingrid Lorch Turner, without whom this would not have been written when it first was, and who, when she came into my life a second time, confinned my confidence in the last chapters of this book.

The entire manuscript, in close to final fonn, has been read by a number of people, to whom lowe very different sons of debts. Walter Kaufmann shared his knowledge of Nieczsche in an extended commentary and saved me from many foolish mistakes. Wilson Carey McWilliams provided the support he always has. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin read the entire book with an intelligence and care born from the feeling that we were struggling toward the same clarity, and that it was bener to struggle together. Finally, Helene Keyssar not only taught me about semicolons, but, during this time we have been together, taught me more about myself, and thus more about what I was attempting to write. That it is with her that I finally break away from Nietzsche is as it should be. Many conversations and criticisms are silently present in these pages. Foremost among these, and most imponant, are those with Alexander Keyssar and Barry O'Connell. I ask them [0 stand for the others.

PREFACE

I xiii

Much of this material has been presented in earlier forms to students in various courxs and discussions. Their responses have influenced direction and emphasis in manners both direct and subtle. I single out here Ellen Pearlman , with whom many conversations and exchanges have helped me to sharpen and focus my thoughts. Finally, lowe to my parents the knowledge and experience of what it means to live a life where moral imperatives are daily made flesh in activity. Their support, criticism, and love made and make my life possible. Acknowledgments, as a form of confession, are a temptation. Let me add that the confusions and opacities in what follows are mine alone . I regret only that all the rimes, loves, and pains could not erase: them. Tracy B. Srrong Wellfleet, Massachusetts August 6, 1974

CONTENTS

Introduction: On

A~~roaching

Nietzsche

20

11

The

Necessi~

III

The

E~istemolog}:'

IV

The Ps}:'chosociolog}:' of Ethics: The Basic Trend of Moralit):'

87

V

Who Is Dion}:'sian? The Problem of the Immoralist

108

VI

What Is Dion):'sian? Nietzsche and the Greeks

135

VU

Parables of the and Politics

186

and Possibilit):' of Truth of Nihilism

She~herd

53

and the Herd: Nietzsche

YIII

The Will 10 Power

218

IX

Th~ Doctrin~

Qf Elem!!J Relurn

260

X

Texts. Pretexts, and lhe Subject

294

E~ilogue

310

Ke}:' to Citations from Nietzsche

319

Notes

323

Bibliograph):'

367

IndcJ
4 Getting to know Nietzsche is a bit like getting to know a new town: I walk the streets, again and again , and only when I have encountered the same spot from a number of different backgro unds and approaches will it fall into place. In a very important way , I do nor then conceive of this book as offering a new interpretation of Nietzsche, anymore than I would think of offering

INTRODUCTION: ON APPROACHING NIETZSCHE

[S

a new interpretation of Paris, though I know the dty well. Nietzsche's writings may appear chaotic and without order; so does a new dty at first glance. What one finds in coming to know a ne:w city is not that it has an order, nor that it is laid down on the: basis of some: abstract logic, but that it can be knovm . When I know Paris, the fact that Paris is not organize:d along some: principle: (e:xcept perhaps the most ge:neral ones of streets, buildings, and intersections) doe:s not stop me from knowing my way about there ; nor can it stop someone: else, if that person spends enough serious time there, from Ic=aming his or her way about. I should note he:re [Wo things which I am, then, not claiming. Firstly, I am not claiming that Nietzsche is "obscure," and that I am eying to make him clear. Everything one needs to know is directly there; being able to find one's way about does not involve looking behind the surface; there: is no hidde:n doctrine in Nietzsche:. The proble:m, rathe:r, is to ide:ntify what counts and how it stands in relation to the other mate:rial available. By and large, Nietzsche means what he says. But, as if he: we:re for us a new town, he will ofte:n write of "eve:nts which lie altoge:ther beyond the possibility of a fre:quent or c=ven rare e:xpe:rience - as the: first language for a new series of experiences."S If his claim is accepted, as I think it must be in some cases, it does not, however, follow that to comprehend what Nie:tzsche is talking about is simply impossible. One might be tempted here to make: an analogy to some: putative: anthropological encounter with an entirely new tribe. It is wrong to conclude:, no matte:r how strange the tribe be, that one cannot come to know and understand it (though, as the history of anthropology shows, there are many dangers). Similarly one can come to know Nietzsche. The: danger is that a reader may venture forth too soon on the assumption that he: knows his way about. Recognition that one knows one's way about comes when all elements one encounters make sense. The: metaphor can be pushe:d one: ste:p further. While some of Nie:tzsche:'s thoughts are of gre:ate:r importance than others, it is wrong to conclude that any portion is necessarily an accident to be discounted. For instance, it is commonplace: now to assume that Nietzsche is not a racist. (Walter Kaufmann is generally accorded the credit in the Anglo-Saxon world for having rescued Nietzsche from the moral abyss of the latter's supposed association with the Nazis.) 6 As shall appear, however, in the: course of his book. while Nietzsche

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INTRODUCTION: ON ..... PPRO..... CHING NIETZSCHE

clearly is not a racist, he paradoxically might also clearly be a racist . J could , as could anyone if so inclined, so through the corpus and produce a picture, with quotes in context, which would seem to indicate that, if perhaps only at the beginning of his life an antiSemite , he was nonetheless committed to the proposition of "superior races." Most modem commentators have generally ignored these portions of Nietzsche, or transfigured them into " rhetoric. " This simply won 't do. It is as if, after visiting happily on the East Side, one decided that Harlem were not part of New York, because, while the rest of the city appeared appealing, there simply was nothing like Harlem back home. In reading Nietzsche, the problem then is to find a way of understanding his apparently "racist" comments together with his apparently "anti-racist" comments. This, of course, will probably mean abandoning the sobriquet racist , but not in favor of ami-racist ; rather, fo r someth ing entirely else. Nietzsche cannot then si mply tell his readers what his discoveries might be. So also I will never learn my way around a new town if J am only told where th ings are. It is, perhaps, a bit like this. Assume a man who has never seen J astrow's duck-rabbit before. He says "That's a duck"; if I respond "Well , don 't you see a rabbit too?" he has to go back and look again; if he still cannot see it as a rabbit, I might help with " Here, look at it like tbis." Pretty soon, he will be able to see it that way for himself. In th is process, nothing has been revealed to him which was previously secret. He has only come to be able to see the material so that it made sense also as a rabbit. I am suggesting a sim ilar proposition about Nietzsche: I hope to be giving the reader a proper nudge so that the vast and apparently disparate corpus of Nietzsche's writings and teachings may be seen as a whole. This forces my second disclaimer. I am not claiming that Nietzsche has a system ; I am also not claim ing that he did not have one. Starting with the ciry metaphor again: Does Paris have a system? The question seems silly. When one knows Paris, one knows one's way about; one has not acquired an algorithm which allows one to make sense of any part of a whole. But , one also does not know it as one knows a memorized series of random numbers. The ciry has, one might say, a certain coherence. With Nietzsche. the case is the same. Nietzsche does not have a system, in the sense of a structure on which to hang his philosophical outer garments. Yet, most all that he writes is of a piece, cut from a common cloth. I thus shall not be

INTRODUCTION , ON APPROACHING NIETZSCHE

I7

occupied with trying to make Nietzsche coherent, nor with showing that he is coherent ; rather, I wish to make manifest the (coherent) thrust of his enterprise. By and large, Nietzsche's thought does not build on itself; it is a series of explorations, or "ex periments," as he calls it. Much the same terms apply to Nietzsche, it seems to me, as Wittgenstein applies to himself ill the preface to his Philosophical Investigations. The beSt I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks ; my thoughlS were crippled if I tried [0 force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. - And this was, of course, connecled wilh the ver), nature of the investigation. For this compels us [0 travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. - The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches or landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved joumeyings.7 The proof of all this will have to come out in the acknowledgment of what follows. Two preliminary questions do arise. What about d ivisions in Nietzsche's own writing? How can I justify the divisions which I have at least implied in my chapter titles? In terms of the first question, the following seems likely. It is commonplace to assume that there is a more or less important tripartite composition to Nietzsche's life and writings. Many authors see an early Basel· Wagner period, followed by a middle " positivist" period , which generally extends from Human, AI/-Too·Human through The Gay Science, and, finall y, a mature period, reaching from Zarathustra to the end. Occasionally a final period of "collapse " (1888 : Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Antichrist, Ecce Homo) is appended. There is nothing particularly wrong (or right) with this classification, except that it naturally tends to lead authors into following it. There are numerous books which simply proceed in a chronological, narrative fashion, spliced with a few "Nietzsche and "'s (Marx, Dewey, Freud , Valery, etc') , or which select one of the periods for more " intensive" study. Such a procedure tends to leave the impression that Nietzsche's writings are "going" in some definite direction , or that his thought is " developing." In a fashion , it is, of course, true that Nietzsche evo lves over the period of twenty years during which he is actively writing, but to emphasize this seem perilous. It makes vel)' difficu lt an examination of the thrust of Nietzsche's enterprise as a whole.8 If I adopt a

8J

INTRODUCTION , ON APPROACHING NIETZSCHE

position that Nietzsche is constantly changing and hits in an almost ad hoc way on new ideas only through the fury of his attack, it will be hard to find an answer to the question ''What is Nietzsche trying to do? " Certainly, Nietzsche himsdf did not think of his own work as divided into evolutionary periods. In later books he reasserts his attention to themes from early books. In 1888, for instance, he is still discussing the apollonian in some of his notes. In the Genealogy, he calls attention to the fact that the essential ideas of the book had already been formulated in Human, AIl-Too-Human . More importantly, themes from his last books are already prefigured in his earlic=r onc=s. This is significant in that whilc= hc= only plays out thc= full implications of a particular question in a late work, the logic of his analysis in an earlic=r piece had alrc=ady thc=n lc=d him to sc=c= thc= manu as problematic. As we shall see, his rdlc=ctions on history and consciousnc=ss in thc= Untimely Considerations and Tbe Gay Science lc=ad him to conclusions then~ which foreshadow the problems of the overman in Zaratbustra and other later works. The same is even more true of c=temal rc=tum . Nic=tzsche himself declares that Datlm of Day and Tbe Gay Science are commentaries, before the fact , on Zara· tbustra. 5I Late in his life, he writc=s to his sister that his works are all of a piece. In his commentary on each of his books in Ecce Homo he makc=s no divisions, and forcefully claims that what appears to look like a change in him (the rejection of Schopenhauer and Wagner) is merely the result of misunderstandings (some his own) of his earlier position on them. Nic=tzschc= himself does propose another division of his life. In a letter sc=nt to Franz Ovc=rbeck on February 11, 1883, he writes of his "eerie, deliberately stcluded secret life, which takes a step every six years, and actually wants nothing but the taking of this step . ... " The six-year phases (which Christopher Middleton insightfully usc=s in his organization of the Letters) are : 1864-1870, student days; 1870-1876, Basel until the break with Wagner; 1876-1882; Frcigeisterei and Lou Salome; 1883-1889, presciently. Zaratbustra until the end. This division has a lot to recommend it, not thc= lc=ast of which is that Nietzsche proposed it. But onc= must also say c=xactly what it is a division of. I rc=ad it as a division of his pe:rsonal and philosophical lifc=, with each stc=p being a signal that he has movc=d more and more into sc=parateness and solitudc=. IO (The rest of thc= letter tc=nds to bear this out.) Nic=tzsche moves out of recognizc:d

INTRODU CTION, ON APP ROACHING NIETZSCHE

(9

institutions, and then away from Wagner and cultural redempcion; he abandons his dream of the early 1880's for a "brotherhood of the Gaya Scienza" as well as his relationship with Lou; he gradually cuts himself off from discourse. And , at the end of his life, he stands alone in his autobiography, which he entitles with the shout by which Pilate presented Christ to the crowd. He will even insist in his last mad letters that Georg Brandes " lose him," that he has paid his debts to Overbeck, and his respects to Jacob Burckhardt. This division seems then to make sense along important lines. In it, we see a man becoming more and more alone in the world and we catch a glimpse of the marvelous paradox of Nietzsche as both Pilate and Christ. It is, after all, his autobiography in which he proclaims himself to the crowd by his Ecce Homo. The division is suggestive not because it gives us time periods by which to categorize Nietzsche's life, but rather because it presents a pattern which Nietzsche himself sees as repeating again and again. Th~ problem Nietzsche sees as posed in himself is that of a man becoming more and more alone, without words for companions, nor companions to hear them. This breakdown, which Nietzsche finds in himself, is, for him , a reflection of the world ; it is a vision of the increasing meaninglessness of human activity and pursuits, and of the extraordinary difficulty in finding a form of life in which he could live freed from the captivity of the prisons of his contemporary world. Much of the work that Nietzsche hopes to accomplish, and some of what he did, is aimed at the creation of precisely just such a new and transfigured world, where men would no longer be the prisoners of the old (of the " human-allto-human") . This, at least, is how I read his last letter to Burckhardt: "In the end, I would rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not ventured to carry my private egoism so far as to desist from creating the world on its accou nt." II One might read this only as testimony to Nietzsche's onrushing madness, and indeed the universal idemifications which Nietzsche makes here (" I am Prado , ... I . [amI Lessc=ps . .. J am ... Chambige . . . I am every name in history . . ") can be read as symptoms of schizophrenia . But this letter can also be read seriously, as Nietzsche's final realization that the inability to be oneself afflicts even him. The pervasiveness and danger of the possibility of being God is Nietzsche's great and true insight into our entire cultural and social condition. Even he did not finally break its attraction.

10

I

iNTRODUCTION, ON APPROACHING NIETZSCHE

The divisions or chapters in my book respond to this understanding of Nietzsche's aim . As far as I have been able , they make mal'!ifest Nietzsche 's enterprise: to show thac thac which had bound men and women together into Western society and culture has necessarily broken down ; to further demonstrate why Nietzsche thinks it so difficult for men to reach an exit from the impasse into which he sees chern headed; and finally, to indicate how he suggests that men possibly might find a new goal, and what the dangers involved in the discovery will be. My enterprise is necessarily manifold, as is Nietzsche's. My exploration of an area of his work at a time tries to keep these aims of Nietzsche in mind. I have no intention, by and large, of dealing with Nietzsche's psychic disturbances. It is generally known that he went insane sometime around the end of 1888 and spent the last ten years of his life in madness. No marter how one understands the psychological processes,12 Nietzsche moves to gradual isolation from the world around him because, in his understanding of it, he has less and less in common with that world . He finds that what he has to say cuts him off from the past; indeed he makes a necessary virtue of this for the success of his enterprise. In the chapter "Why I Am so Wise " in his autobiography he will go so far as to claim that he lives on "only in his mother," that is, that he has engendered himself and stands without normal parentage or genealogy in the world which he is attacking. For Nietzsche, this break is necessary . Mankind is, and remains, pushed by an abysmal and abyss-making logic. "What I recount," he writes in the early part of 1888, "is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism . This history can already be recounted: for the necessity itself is here at work. This future speaks already in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere ..... For some time now our entire European culture moves itself as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension {Tortur der SpannungJ, which grows from decade to decade ..... For why is the arrival of nihilism necessary? Because our previous values themselves draw it in their wake; because nihilism is the logical result of thinking through our greatest values and ideals until the endbecause we must experience nihilism first, to be able to uncover precisely what the worth of these values was .. .. " i3 Nietzsche says here that all of past history (or all that counts) is

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[II

inevitably making for nihilism , that the things we have valued the most are the main contributors to this process, and that we have no choice but to live through this, if there is ever to be anything else. One is tempted, on reading this, to assume that Nietzsche's psychic disturbances had , by this time, taken the upper hand and to dismiss such extravagant claims. Indeed , this passage from the Nacblass is not his only such world-historical posture. Nietzsche claims to be a "destiny," " dynamite ," which "breaks the history of the world in two"; in a draft of a letter to his sister, he writes that "quite literally" he holds "the future of mankind in the palm of (his) hand" and that it was with him that "the question of millenniums had been decided ." Such claims are bewildering from the perspective of the present. Despite the ex perience of two world wars and the constant threat of a general conflagration, the notion that everything is necessarily dissolving into catastrophe may seem exaggerated. It is, perhaps, true that, as Andre Malraux points out, Nietzsche did understand that the twentieth century would be the time of ideological and universal wars ("for the domination of the earth") ; is this, however, a reason for thinking that all of the " highest values" of the West are responsible for the disasters of this century? To me, if Nietzsche is to mean anything at all, claims such as this one must be taken seriously. I shall argue in what follows that the only understanding of Nietzsche which makes any sense is precisely one informed by his consciousness that everything dominant in Western culture - politics, religion, morality, and so on - has been of a piece and that no one part of it can pass away without the rest eventually following suit. Such events form one of the meanings of his famous aphoristic recognition of the " death of God." Nietzsche is not simply saying that "God is dead"; such, after all, was no news, since Hegel had announced it some seventy-five years before. Nietzsche is also claiming that " we killed Him," and that the news of the murder has not yet reached the consciousness of the general public. who continue to live on "in the shadows of the dead God." The consequences of this death, Nietzsche claims, are cosmic and catastrophic. "Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we unbound this eanh from this sun? Where does it . move now? Where do we move? Does not the night and only the night come constantly on? Shall we not light lanterns in the morning? " 14 These images should not be dismissed as empty rhetoric. Accord-

12 I

INTRODUCTION, ON APPROACmNG NIETZSC HE

ing to Nietzsche, after the death of God, we will not know how we stand toward anything that used to give us constancy and meaning. There are no natural limits any more (no " horizon " ), regularity has disappeared (the earth is "loosed from the sun "). We cannot see any more, for night comes on and we are forced to rely on artifice for preserving our normal life patterns (to "light lanterns in the morning"). The crisis of the time, as signaled in the death of God, announces a time when men no longer know their way about with themselves, or with others. The history of the " next two centuries" will lx the gradual discovery of this fact . For Nietzsche, this comes about, I suggested before , because of a pattern inscrilxd in the Western way of doing things, which, when pushed to the limit, leads to nihilism . It is important here to be clear about exactly what Nietzsche is saying. He is not trying to say that in the past men thought they based their actions on God (or another authority), but that, in fact, they were "really" operating on the basis of something else. If this were all he were doing, such a revelation should make men more, rather than less, secure in their lives. Nietzsche rather is saying that, in the past, men based their lives on (for example) God , that this foundation is, for particular historical and logical reasons, no longer available, and that there is nothing else . For instance. in The Dawn of Day. Nietzsche writes that there are "two manners of denying morality ." On the one hand, one might deny that the moral motives men advance to explain their actions actually lead to those actions. Morality , in this perspective, would merely be a form of self-deception, an illusion from which one might simply awaken. Such Voltairian criticism is not Nietzsche's. Nietzsche denies morality "as he would alchemy." This is not a denial that there have been alchemists, nor an assertion that alchemists were somehow lying to themselves; it recognizes that they were persuaded to their experiments by alchemical motives. It says, instead, that the whole operation was based on erroneous perspectives. This makes precise the focus and nature of Nietzsche's attack. He does not deny that there is, for example, moral lxhavior, nor even that it has a definition on which men could agree. Rather, he asserts that it can only exist if certain other premises are held true, much in the way that alchemy can exist only if certain presuppositions are held to be true. The problem confronting modem times, then, is for

INTRODUCTION, ON .... PPROACHING NJETZSCUE

[13

Nietzsche that the presuppositions, which made, for example, morality possible, no longer exist. The reasons for this have not been examined; they will form the focus for much of the investigations that follow here. There is also no assurance, as the parable of the death of God makes clear, that men immediately recognize that the life they live and the values they espouse are becoming, in an increasingly sharp way , incompatible. The "wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth" which Nietzsche forsees in Ecce Homo IS will be the resu lts of this last self-discovery. To criticize Nietzsche for being an "immoralist" is then to miss a very important point. By going "beyond good and evil" he means to deny not only morality, but also immorality. In fact, his focus turns away from behavior and concentrates on that which makes morality (for instance) "possible," or, in his language, " the soil" from which it springs. In the passage 'cited from Dawn above, he continues: I deny also immorality: not that coumless men feel themselves [0 be immoral. but rather that there be a ground in truth thai one should feel this way. I do not deny thu which is self-evident - presuming that I am no fool - thai man y acts, which are called immoral. arc to be avoided and fought against, and thai man y which are called moral, are to Ix: pursed and accomplished . I do mean : tbt ont, QS tbt otber, but o n otber grounds thQn bt{ort. We must cbQngt our tboughts aro und [um:ulernt n] , in order at last. md perhaps very far from now, to reach even mOTe : in order 10 ltarn to {ttl ntwly (um: u{iiblt n,,16

The clear indication is that our present grounds have led first [0 the death of God and now push us onward toward coming catasrrophies. I am suggesting here, in a preliminary fashion, that Nietzsche sees the source of the problems besetting Western civilization as incarnate in humans themselves, or, at least, in humans as they are now. This, I presume, is the source of his strictures against the " human-all-toohuman ," and the grounds for his call for something or someone who is not human-all-too-human, but rather "overman." Implicit here is the notion that to deal with the problems besetting the civilization (what these are, I shall investigate), men will require not the discoveries of answers nor of new ways of dealing with the problems, but rather the development of beings who simply do not live as humanall-too-human . If "slave morality" leads mankind down the path to nihilism, as Nietzsche claims it does, his answer will not seek for a

14

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INTRODUCT ION, ON .... PPRO.... CH ING NIETZSCHE

manner of dealing with the path, but rather try to eliminate the path. Some other journey must be undertaken . This portion of Nietzsche is the dimly understood basis fo r the oft encountered contention that Nietzsche is a " romantic." I understand " romantic" to describe a person who believes that somewhere under the shellac of modern civilization lies a natural man, who requires only liberation to come into full play in the world. A variation on the "Nietzsche as romantic" thesis is the notion that he wants to somehow " return " to the Greek heroes, and that they are the models who provide examples for contemporary man. Both contentions are almost always wrong. As we shall see on several occasions, Nietzsche clai ms that return is impossible. Rather he wishes to (selectively) break the hold of the past over the present. To use psychological language, he sees our past as the source of the neuroses and psychoses besetting the present , much as Freud saw the past of a person as the source of ongoing patterns of behavior that underlay adult neuroses, and, in Civilization and Its Discontents, attempted a similar diagnosis of the entire culture. For Nietzsche, the problem will then be to change the person or sociecy in such a manner that the basis of the neurosis is eliminated. 17 What this means for Nietzsche and how it is to be achieved is the subject of this book ; it is a continuing theme in Nietzsche. In a passage in the early On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, to which I shall return several times, he writes: "Men are the resultant of previous generations, also ... of the errors, passions and crimes; it is impossible to shake off this chain." There is, he continues, no escape from our criminal ancestry; it constantly afflicts us, the more we continue to learn about it. To be rid of it we will have to " plant a new way of life, a new instinct, a second nature that withers the first. " This will be "an attempt to gain a past a posteriori from which we might spring, as against that from which we do spring .... [To those who succeed] there is the consolation of knowing that this first nature was also o nce a second nature and that each conqueri ng second nature became o no= the first."ls We are, fo r Nietzsche, chained to our past so strongly that the tie cannot simply be broken. Nietzsche does not advocate a blithe ecrasez /'infome de I'autorite . Simply to deny the past wou ld not mitigate the fact that it will live o n in those very ones who deny it. Nietzsche wants rather to "plant a new way of life" (Gewohnung)

INT ROD UCT ION: ON APPROACHINC NIETZSCIIE

[15

which will "wither" the first. This forms the basis for the " new problem" he sees dawning in a hardly yet recognizable manner over the human race. Only those who " have grasped that until now we have only embodied our errors" can begin to see this new task and "w embody knowledge and make it instinctive." 19 It is important not to mistake the direction of these considerations. Nietzsche is not asserting that the whole range of questions that one might associate with traditional Western philosophy and especially metaphysics are useless or inappropriate questions. Such an attitude might be closer to that taken by the logical positivists in the early pan of the twentieth century, who in their passion for accurate knowledge, rejected as simply muddleheaded many of the enterprises of traditional philosophy. Nietzsche's stance is quite other. For him, because traditional philosophy did more or less accurately describe peo ple's lives, it is to be rejected, along with those lives. Human moral reasoning did speak of human moral concerns. It is the moral concerns themselves and the lives which give rise to them that Nietzsche is concerned to attack. He sees them as a problem in the manner in which one might see alchemy as a problem: the extirpation will be of a kind as w simply eliminate the option of being an alchem ist. Once again, fo r Nietzsche the source of human discontents goes so deep as to be bound up in the very stuff of what it is to be human-all-too-human. Extirpation, in fact, a new "soil," is needed . The process is not, and will not be easy. The logic by which the past lives on to always inform the present is the logic of genealogy. I shall have opportunity to go inco this central Nietzschean concept at length. It suffices to note here that by th is logic there is no auto· matic transformation of one stage in to another. Marx, writing around the same t ime, had diagnosed many of the same crises in bourgeois civilization as Nietzsche. He, too, thought that a final transformation was needed, such that men and society could come to operate on the basis of a quite different logic. In Marx's term, men were w pass from "prehistory," where they were controlled and shaped by a harmful class struggle, into " history," where the dynamic of class warfare wo uld no longer exist. The men of Marx's German Ideology who can hunt in the morn ing, fish in the afternoon, and criticize after dinner, with out "ever thereby becoming a hunter, a fisherman, or a critical critic," are men undriven by logics external to them-

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selves. They do not become what society would have them be, for their society does not so drive them. Marx had thought that this happy situation might be arrived at as the culmination of the forces of history. In Nietzsche, however, history provides no such helping hand. The same genealogical kernel continues to inform the whole development of the West, from Socrates to the present, and even , he indicates, for some centuries to come. Hence, it is not because we have arrived at a crisis point that a cransfiguration will occur. In Marx, there is a point in history when all things become new. In Nietzsche, this change is not ordained in the process of our development;20 thus, if it is to occur at all , it will have to be made from whole clom. The immediate question is, of course, Who will make it? The obvious answer is that it will be those men and women who have managed to eliminate even the roots of "slave morality" from themselves. To engender such beings is, I believe , what Nietzsche intended by the doctrine of eternal return. I can do no more here than indicate this ; the exploration of this doctrine in Nietzsche is the subject of the whole book. What is certain is that Nietzsche intended his teaching and philosophy to reshape and consciously remold the very stuff of humanity. What might this mean? I read Nietzsche 's intention to refer to the following problem. He sees the period of Western civilization extending roughly from Socrates until the present as beset with an impossible dilemma. We are , in Nietzsche 's diagnosis, beholden to a double conviction: we should continue to look for answers to the discontents of our civilization, yet we must despair of finding them . Kant had noted this in the Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason , one hundred years before Nietzsche. He wrote there , in a famous passage, to which we shall return in a number of contexts, mat "Human reason has this peculiar fare, thar in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which , as transcending all its powers, it is also unable to answer. " 22 Kant saw this dilemma lim ited to one species of human reason, and thought he found a solution. For Nietzsche, however, this " peculiar fate" is endemic to the whole of the human condition. This problem is then more man the "problem of metaphysics," and is, for Nietzsche, manifest in all aspects of human life . Everywhere, man is pushed by

INTRODUCTION : ON APPROACHING NIETZSCHE

[17

constantly trying to reach that which he increasingly knows to be impossible. This state, known to Nietzsche as "nihilism," expresses more and more a life of "hatred against the human, even more against the animal, still more against the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, the fear of happiness and beauty, this demand to get out of all appearance , change, becoming, death, wish , from demanding itself. ... " 22 This goal is never reached, for the desire to reach it has made it unattainable, and, at the last, Nietzsche sees men p~ferring and having to " will the void, rather than be void of will." "The first question," writes Nietzsche, "is not at all whether or not we are happy with ourselves, but instead whether we are happy with anything at aU." 2J The problem, then, is for men to shed this " will to the void." To achieve this is a complicated and multifarious task. Nietzsche says man must first "evaluate that ponion of existence which has until now alone been valued" : he must, that is, formulate an accurate analysis of precisely what the form of existence is that the West has lived under. Then he must "grasp from what this valuation springs," discover why the West has the values that it does, whether they are "natural," or if they spring from a series of events which might or might not be. He must "stop shorr and grasp exactly what ... in fact says Yes (for one, the instinct to suffer; for another, the instinct of the herd ; and, for a third, the instinct of the majority in contradic· tion to the exceptions ... )." Once these genealogical stables are set in order, he will then be able to see "how link a dionysian dimension of value for existence is obliged to it. " 24 " Dionysian" is Nietzsche's word for what he is trying to bring about. I shall investigate its precise meaning; more important here is his insistence that a form of life is possible which shares liale or no common characteristics with that which afflicts men at present. What Nietzsche gives us is not, in my reading, a new set of philosophical answers to particular problems; it is, instead, more a form of human archeology, an analysis of the particular "soil" from which these problems have sprung. The philosophical problems men have met and set for themselves in the past two and one-half thousand years are, in Nietzsche's analysis, related to the sorts of beings these men were. This is not true only of those who call themselves philosophers ; after all. the problems are not limited to those who thought about them. but are endemic to the condition of

18

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INT RODUCTION , ON APPROACHING NIETZSOIE

human-all-too-human. Nietzsche does not pro pose a new philosophito these problems; indeed, such an attempt would be foolhardy. The problem lies in the kinds of beings who saw these sorts of problems as necessary. The proper response is no t an answer, but the development of a form of life in which these matters are no longer problems. Nietzsche continues on in the passage cited above: " I hit upon the extent to which another stronger type of man would necessarily have to conceive of the elevation and enhancement of men as going in another direction : higher beings, as beyond good and evil, as beyond those values that cannot disown their origin in the sphere of suffering, the herd, and the majori ty .... " What does it mean to make all of human history a problem? At the very least, it would seem to be to see human history as the result of certain choices and acceptances which need not be. It is, after ail, only in the sphere of necessity that a given question cannot become problematic. If, for instance , there is such a thing as a more or less fixed " human nature ," then , once a given practice has been shown to be grounded firmly in that human nature, that is all that can be said about it. To make something a problem means to show that there is no necessity that it be or not be, and to produce questions that have to be taken seriously. It is perhaps an indication of the fo rce and originality of Nietzsche's enterprise that, while we do not always immediately understand his questions, nor see perfectly clearly what he is calling into question, we nonetheless often continue to walk within his town. If one allows oneself this seduction, the first knowledge gained will be knowledge of self; Nietzsche forces upon his readers questions about beliefs that one may have tho ught secure. But , and it is this that keeps him from being merely epatant pour fa bourgeoisie, there is never an ind ication in Nietzsche that self-knowledge is a legitimate stopping po int. One may find that the self one comes to know is radically flawed and must then be changed. The problem arises: If the self as we have known it is flawed, then so also must be all that it knew and did, even what it called truth . If, however, all "horizons are erased," then one, literally, does not know o ne's way about , and what will count as a question, or an answer, or indeed as truth itself, is not clear. Not knowing one's way about was for Wittgenstein the paradigm of a philosophical problem ; it arose in connection with finding oneself in unfamiliar and extraordinary circumstan ces. Nietzcal answer

INTRODUCTION , ON APPROAC HI NG NIETZSC HE

(19

sch~, as I trace his enterprise, seeks to show us that a world we have thought familiar has, in fact, become strange, even though we have yet to fully acknowledge this. Then, having shown us that we have and will become strangers to o urselves, he would show us a world wh~re we might, once again, and for th~ firs t t i m~, com~ to be oursdves. What follows here is an attempt to retrace the complexity of the journey he sketches.

Chapter II THE NECESSITY AND POSSIBILITY OF

TRUTH It migbt be imagined tblu some pTOpositions baving tbe form of empiric"t propositions WeTt! hll,denftd ond /u" c< fiaRed as cbannels lor such empinelll propositions as 'Wert nor bardened but fluid; Qnd Ibilt tbis relationship

altered with time. in tbal fluid pmpositions hardened and hard ont's became fluid.

- Ludwig Witlgcnstein. On Certainty, par. 96

The First World War marked a turning poine in the confidence Westerners were able to express in the world around them. This conflict revealed to an almost incredulous Europe that the course of political and social events had acquirc=d a logic and power all its own, neither subject to the rcS[raims imposed by a preexisting moral community among nations and their leaders, nor attributable, as concdvably had been the case with the French Revolution , to (he actions of one deviant nation. A century that had starred with the anticipation of the possibility of men at last possessing the capacity and knowledge to con trol and shape their own destinies ended with the insane frightfuln ess of Verdun and the Machiavellian idealism of Versailles, and for the first rime, men in all 120

TIlE NECESSITY AND POSSIBILITY OF TRUTH

(

21

walks of life faced the possibility of knowing that existence did not present itself meaningfully to them. Not only was the violence and oppression of the social, political, and moral world obvious - which is after all nothing new - bm men and women began to believe that such a state of affairs could not be judged in terms of any external standard. " Man had died," wrote Ezra Pound , "for an old bitch gone in the teeth, for a botched civilization," and the world emerged from the war with all faith in old gods gone and no sense that the future mattered. This was a time "after Utopia,"1 when the promise of actualizing an ideal society faded in the long aftermath of the French Revolution . By 1920 - Nietzsche foresaw it as much as fifty years earlier - the failure of nerve of bourgeois society was becoming painfully destructive. In 1919, in his great lecture " Politics as a Vocation ," Max Weber defined politics as " the monopoly of the legitimate means of violence inside a given terri[Ory." The definition may appear cynical, but Weber at least accurately reflected some of the changes that had gone on in Europe over the previous century. Twenty years prior, Friedrich Nietzsche also called the politics of his time "organized violence."2 This definition, too, portrays the transformations which, having brewed throughom Europe during the previous centuries, had finally erupted into their first major political form with the First World War. For Nietzsche, such definitions mark not so much a permanent " fact " as a process of historical change which has roots in times far removed even from the tum of the eighteenth century. He sees them as the increasingly immanent culmination of the whole of what we call "Western Civilization"; a crisis of truly unprecedented worldhistorical proportions. In Chapters III through VII , I examine Nietzsche's account and analysis of this development. I wish now only to investigate in a preliminary fashion the situation sketched above. That men no longer feel the world abo ut them to be meaningful marks some sort of change, but it is not clear of what sort. I am interested here in tracing Nietzsche's analysis of the alterations in the relation of men to themselves, [0 others, and to the world around them such that they now apparently inevitably come to such hopelessness. The matter is complicated: after all, one cannot simply decide that there is no sense [0 the universe. Anyone who seriously holds such a position, individually or in a group so characterized,

22

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TIlE NECESSITY AND POSSIBILITY OFTRUTII

muS[ be convinced of it. To move from a state of belief that the actual world might be understood in terms of some potentially universal categories to a position that sees no sense or meaning anywhere, presupposes that something has happened. Turgenev, and others after him, call this change nihilism. This is not the methodological doubt of Descartes, nor the relaxed and universal skepticism of Hume ; nihilism does not only des"cribe the questioning of old truths and values. Such questioning, after all , goes on constantly in one form or another. It is rather a consciousness that there is no meaning or truth ro be found at all. As Nietzsche notes in the winter of 1888: "The feeling of valuelessness was reached when one realized that the basic character of existence could not be understood with either the notion of purpose, or that of unity, or that of truth. With such interpretations, nothing is reached or attained: the encompassing uniry of events is missing in the multipliciry of occurrences: the character of existence [Dasein] is not 'true,' is false . . " one has absolutely no more ground [0 convince oneself of a true world ."] In this definition, there is the sensibility that nihilism is a historical development, not a philosophical (or anti-philosophical) position accessible at any period . "Before," remarks Kirsanov in Fathtrs and Sons, "there were Hegelians, now there are only nihilists." That Nietzsche sees the characteristic of the modem age as nihilism is hardly open ro question .4 It implies however that consciousness and public knowledge of " truth" are no longer held to be possible. If this is in fact the state in which men find themselves, then they have changed from a previous sensibiliry in which they believed not only that truth might be arrived at, but that in fact some moral and physical facts were true. One could expect that two or more people, in fact that most people, might arrive at agreement as to what categories applied to particular data, and as to how they applied. To assert then, as Nietzsche does, that "the character of existence is ... false" is to note the consciousness of a change from a form of life which understood events and experiences as epiphenomenally rooted in a larger and unquestioned context, to one which saw them without any unifying common ground. For Hegel, this unifying common ground had been World History ; for Kant, it was the structures of pure reason; for Emerson and the transcendentalists, the reality of human emotions. Earlier there had been natural law.

THE NECESSITY AND POSSIBILITY OFTRUTII

[ 23

Even the aesthetic despair of Diderot in Rameau's Nephew reflected , as Hegel noted acutely, a form of raising oneself above a "tom and shattered condition."s For Hegel, Kam, and the others, the world makes available to men a structure independenr of human subjectivity and thus pOlentially permits " objective" agreement. Nihilism denies there is any such overarching or underlying scheme : events simply are, and, at least for those who are " human-all-too-human," nothing can be called more true or meaningful than anything else. In the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche recapitulates what he believes to be his new and ultimate question about "truth ." " We finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question .... The problem of the value of truth came before us - or was it we who came before the problem ;"6 It is difficult to deal with this query in a di rect fashion . It presupposes an understanding of a particular historical rendezvous of men and world history which at first glance rings false. What is the value of truth? One is tempted to simply say that this is not a question one can ask. Here, and in other circumstances when Nietzsche seems not to be making sense, we must resist the temptation to dismiss his questions. Instead , we should ask why it is that this question rings false to us. After aU, it appears to be of the same superficial form as queries we have no difficulty understanding, such as, What is the value of being cured of an illness? In such cases, the answer will come in making reference to some other value, itself accepted and of obvious importance, for instance, to have control over one's life, or, to remain al ive, or, health as preferable to illness. The particu lar reason doesn't matter: the fact that we can easily make such answers is of importance here. With the " problem of truth, " however, matters seem to change. We are tempted to refer it to itself and say that " truth is what one seeks, because o ne seeks what is true. " Nietzsche's question implies that what we actually mean by true is in some fashion analogous to what we mean by (i n the example above) being cured. It implies that there must be some preconditions which have been generally accepted before something can be called " true." Thus, when nihilists despaired of truth, they were in fact despairing of the commonly acceptable understandings that permitted the value of truth . In order to approach the question of the value of truth we must first understand how Nietzsche thinks it is possible for something to be true. What actually has occurred when we come to

24 1

THE NECESSITY AND POSSIBILITY OF TRlfTH

the conclusion that something is in fact the case? What spiritual and intellectual acts have we ~rformed? Are there conceivable conditions under which we no longer could perform such acts? For what reasons? What would ~ the consequen~s of not bdng able to do so?

Preconditions for Truth : Preliminaries

The embarrassment that one feels with the question of the "value of uuth" is due to a "prejudgment and prejudi~ (which] give away the metaphysicians of all ages. "7 Men need to feel that some values are not subject to question and are ~yond it. In a note from the spring of 1888 Nietzsche writes: " All kinds of imperatives have been employed to make moral values appear permanent: they have been commanded for the longest time: - they seem instinctive. like inner commands. They impress IdriickenJ themselves as conditions for the existence of society, such that moral values are felt to be beyond discussion . .. . Every means is employed to paralyze reflection and criticism in this field. "s Here, as well as in the section on "The Prejudi~s of Philosophers" in Beyond Good and Evil. there is an implied diS[inction ~tween two types of statements having to do with morality and truth. While the diS[inction I am about to draw is not specifically made by Nietzsche, it is certainly latent in his proposition that " moral values are felt to be beyond discussion." I would argue that there is in Nietzsche an important distinction between that which is unquestioned and that which is unquestionahle .9 If a truth-statement is unquestionable, men (some men , for some time) refrain from moral compulsion. One simply refuses to talk about it and admit it into conscIOusness. Such conclusions are fragile. For instance, when Wagner in Lobengrin proposes a situation in which the salvation of the kingdom of Brabant depends on the heroine refraining from asking the unknown knight his name - Das sol/st du mich nicht fragen - the resultant moral structure is quickly and necessarily deS[royed by the fatal question. Nietzsche, of course. refuses to let Wagner even suggest such moral adolescence. He knows full well that such warnings rarely work with the re~llious children against whom th ey are habitually directed, let alone with a society.

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God's existence." 12 There was a rime when the evidence available was such that belief in God could be deduced from other unquestioned statements. Belief in God could therefore be made an "unquestionable" proposition. Or again. if it is perfectly obvious that the earth is the center of the universe, one could make certain calculations designed to render compatible that unquestioned presupposition and the observed movements of the planets. Ptolemy did it very well. better in fact than Copernicus in his more "accurate" system. 13 It should be immediately apparent from these examples and Nietzsche's discussion that nothing remains necessarily unquestioned or even i?eyond the effect of being questioned. There are. fo r Nietzsche. no necessary and permanent characteristics of a so-called human condition. His view of the world permits the possibility of humans "agreeing" on what is true at any given historical period. However by making the link between unquestioned statements and moral statements essentially psychological (or. as Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil, "psycho-physiCal"), the investigation and disclosure of th e basic presuppositions current at any particular time will only be impeded by the people involved having unconscious reasons which ensure the sanctity of the presuppositions. Academic philosophy is thus for Nietzsche a "personal confession of its originator and a kind of involuntary and unperceived memo ir. " 14 In fact. one can move easily from here to the notion that the practical moral systems of a culture or country are also such confessions, that is, are the manifestations of some set of unquestioned presuppositions. These presuppositions form what I have been calling, following Wittgenstein , a "form of life." If this is admined. one then must see that the relation between unquestioned and unquestionable presuppositions changes over time. It is not quite correct to refer to this relationship as " historical." Nietzsche argues as early as The Use and Disadwlntage of History for Life that life itself requires that some presuppositions be "unquestioned": "This is a universal law: a living thing can be healthy and strong and productive only inside a horizon . If it is unable to draw a horizon around itself. and too selfish to loose its view in another's. it will come to an untimely end." IS Nietzsche continues on to indicate that human life characteristically reposes on a forgotten past. If one cannot forget. such that all is eternally present. then

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Unquestionable considerations may then emerge into consciousness at any time. Indeed a considerable part of moral education has been devoted to elevating barriers against such questions. The guilt thar stands ready to enforce the proposition "You mustn't say that" is only quamitatively different from the monopoly of the means of violence which Weber and Nietzsche saw as supporting the modem state. Against such restraints Nietzsche wishes [Q encourage as much doubt as possible. "We moderns are all opponents of Descartes and snuggle against his easy doubt. One must doubt better than Descartes." 10 Under any question left unasked, Nietzsche identifies a conscious or unconscious moral prejudice. There is a point, he notes in Beyond Good and Evil, when the philosopher's conviction finally appears on stage: adventavit asinus. If Descartes doubted tOO easily, something kept him from continuing his process. He was presupposing something, and that kept his doubt from being as "good" as it might have been. Such presuppositions or convictions are precisely the unquestioned statements. They are matters about which one literally has no questions to ask ; as I indicated before, the "value of nuth " has been felt in Western moral science to be such a matter. II Such questions must remain unexamined and with no form of discourse appropriate [0 them ; any query about them will automatically transform them into the first category of statements. To ask a question of something presupposes a stance which, at least for the duration of the question, is "outside" that which is being questioned. It implies, in other words. that one is conscious of that which one is questioning. Hence that which is questioned is no longer a " presupposition " and is certainly not " beyond discussion." To be beyond discussion designates then for Nietzsche that system of unconditioned predicates which make a thought or form of life possible. Such predicates function, in Wittgenstein's words, as " hardened channels" which make other propositions possible. Since they are taken for granted, they must appear as real; we must take them as real, since we cannot conceive of questioning them. For instance, as Collingwood observes, Anselm's argument for the existence of God proves "not that , because our idea of the existena= of God is an idea of that greater than which nothing can be thought. therefore God exists. but that because our idea of God is an idea of that greater than which nothing can be thought , we stand committed to belief in

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action and life itself become imjX)ssible, for all choices appear equaUy invalid. I shall rerum ro this in greater detail below, but the "unhistorical," as Nietzsche refers to that which is forgotten, makes human life itself possible. When, later in the essay, he refers to the "historical sickness" which afflicts modem men , his point is the same as the one de\,e1oped above about nihilism. Nihilism is the historical sickness with which men are incapable of forgetting enough so that a life-giving horizon may be drawn around them. Wittgenstein noted this whole relationship very well: "The mythology may shift back into a state of flux, the river bed of thoughts may shift . But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river bed, and the shift of the bed itself, though there is not a sharp division of one from the orher.'·16 To which one must add that if one could no longer distinguish the "waters" and the "bed," then thought itself would lack a foundation. Such is Nietzsche's concern, even if it was nO( Wittgenstein's.

The Unmasking Imp erative

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche self-consciously proclaims himself a "turning point in history." The change he would make is world-shattering, on the level of that Socrates or Christ made. No matter how one takes such an announcement in terms of Nietzsche as a person , it is also important in terms of implications for his conception of history. Nietzsche sees himself as the first to be able, or the first (0 dare, to ask the questions that removed certain propositions from the realm of the unquestioned. As I noted in the first chapter, Nietzsche's contribution does not consist of having solved problems in a new manner, but rather of having come up with new questions. It is now apparent that he conceives of these quenions as primarily destructive in character. They do not open up new vistas for us (0 explore, but rather force into the world of consciousness those matters that previously had been, so to speak, inaccessible. He is "dynamite" since he blows up that which had appeared (0 be stable and permanent. By forcing men to give an account of themselves, he will show them that their lives rest not only on illusions, but on dangerous illusions. Moral propositions can thus move into a realm where their only

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defense is no longer their inaccessibilicy. but only that protection afforded by the possibilicy of being unquestionable. To remain unquestionable, a proposition must be:: protected by force if necessary. By finding questions for the previously pre-supposcd, Nietzsche must encourage "political" defenses of morality. He makes it increasingly difficult to defend a particular morality 9 The language and imagery are still those of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche soon abandons the notion of the " kernel of existence," or, what he calls in preparatory work for Tbe Birth of Tragedy, the Urein . 10 It is nonetheless possible to extract a number of Nietzsche's views of the architectonic quality of language from this passage. Language and words themselves do not respond to " reality," but are a set of conceptualizations that make a certain type of survival possible. Language is used "like a spider web to capture what we need to know." 11 And, as we talk about the world, so it must be; an at least partially effective feedback must ex ist. But the " reality to which they (words] correspond is in fact already a humanly invented reality." Thus, investigation of the structure of language will lay bare part of the genealogy which forms our world. "We are constantly Jed astray by words and concepts," writes Nietzsche in the section of Human , All· Too-Human called "The Wanderer and His Shadow," " and are induced to think of things as other than they are, as separated , indivisible. existing in the absolute. A philosophical mythology lies hidden in language. "12 A " mythology" is the formulation of some particular event such that it appears to acquire universal and abso lute sense; our mythology is to be uncovered . The mythology prevents people from seeing language as a problem in itself, since it continually will tend to present to men the same things as problems. If there were to be a totally new set of experiences, then , as Nietzsche notes above, they would remain unknown ; men would not have the words for them. The reverse presumably also follows. If we continue using the words and language we have, there will not be a " totally new" set of experiences; in fact, we will be prevented from recognizing them as such by virtue of our continued use of the same language_ We are "caught in a picture" - one might say a family portrait . Recognizing this potentially neurotic

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repetition with exactly the same term that Wittgenstein was later to make famous, Nietzsche writes: "The strange family resemblance of all Indian , German, and Greek philosophizing is explained easily enough. Precisely where there is a kinship of languages, it cannot but occur, due to the common philosophy of grammar - I mean, due to the unconscious domination of and orientation by similar grammatical functions - that everything is prepared from the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems .... " IJ In a sense, the focus on language allows Nietzsche to bring Hegel back to the earth: language provides a set of plebian Weltgeister which establish the recurrent and recognizable developmental patterns in the world around us. Without language, without the ability to formulate the world, all would appear as it does to an infant - the play and chaos of an unending river which is never twice the same. FinaUy, if there is no agreement among languages as to what constitutes reality, neither is there an extra-linguistic of validity by which to judge a language. Precisely because there is no unity among languages, so also is there no language that might on some scale be rated more "correct" than any other. Such a scale would be like a Ding an sich in epistemology; it would imply the existence of a world that affects men and about which they by definition could know nothing. This is again the ctiticism already leveled at the sphere of theoretical reason . The mind , however, Nietzsche remarks, constantly seeks to persuade itself to the contrary . It is a "mask of dissimulation," and "seeks to celebrate its Saturnalia when there would be a happy union of word and world." 14 The imagery is drawn from Hegel. But, where Hegel believed the union possible in principle and in time, for Nietzsche, once again, the mind is only seeking to persuade itself that the world it knows is the one true world . The Morality of Language

It should by this time be apparent that Nietzsche ascribes to language a sense at least as broad as does Wittgenstein in the Investigations. For both men a language is very much an expressable way of doing things and of going about one's business. It does not mean simply the uttering of words used to describe life ; such would imply too great a

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separation of language from the world, and would repeat the error that Nietzsche understands as the division of the world into real and apparent. A language describes and is (part of) a form of life. It is a fuzzily coherent way of doing things. It is not intended to cover all possibilities; rather it blurs at the edges. Thus "words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite sign images for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one u~s the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of internal experiences; i1l tbe end one bas to have one's experiences in common (gemein) ."·5 As Wittgenstein said in one of his most memorable aphorisms: "To imagine a language is to imagine a fonn of life." Here again Nietzsche refuses a simple nominalism or relativism . As he also argues about morality, and as already seen in the previous chapter, things are not just what men make of them ; there can be no such separation between doer and deed . Errors are not due to false or improper creation. but rather reside in the whole form of life. which itself is an error. caused by accepting what we see - what the language presents to us - as "real" or even as "appearance" masking reality. Indeed, men are "caught in error," for the "mistakes" to which their language leads them are mistakes for the whole form of life. "Indeed nothing has yet had a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being (Sein J ... ; every word we say and every sentence we speak is in its favor .... 'Reason ' in language Oh! what an old deceptive female! I am afraid that we will not be rid of our belief in God because we still believe in grammar." 16 The link of the belief in God and the faith in grammar shows that Nietzsche does not hold that belief in God was simply a mistake, or deluded pure foolishness; such Voltairiana is far too easy and superficial a criticism. Nor does he assume that because the belief in God is a "mere illusion ," a simple announcement might lift this burden off the shoulders of contemporary man. Rather, he is suggesting that the structure of culture is synergistic; a change in one part of it will necessarily eventually show up in the other parts. Such a perspective would usually be fundamentally conservative - it is identified in Western thought with Edmund Burke - except for the fact that Nietzsche wishes to encourage su ch change. God is dead : so much has been announced ; slowly and inexorably, therefore, for reasons

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yet unexamined . the structure of language must respond to this · news. Men continue, in Nietzsche's angry accusation, to live on in the "shadows of the dead God," still influenced and controlled by the leftover effects of such belief. The gradual approach of the "great noon" signifies for Nietzsche that time when all shadows disappear; he has, for instance. only cold contempt for a writer like George Eliot , who while proclaiming herself an agnosti c, srill retains fundamentally Christian moral princi ples. 17 In effect. Nietzsche has taken the statement "God is truth " in a chillingly literal fashion. The long process by whi ch men effectuated the murder of God does not StOP with the simple announcement of the death of the divinity in the famous aphorism about the " marketpla ce" in The Gay Science. The death of God is simply a signal point in a long process whose ultimate consequence and conclusion is the destruction of the foundations of tru th itself. And , as truth becomes in Nietzsche's understanding increasingly impossible. so also must die all that which depended on it, in particular the language that made it possible and that was a part of it . The language will not survive if that which made it possible perishes: it, roo, is one of those "great things" which, in the Genealogy, Nietzsche noted "perish of their own accord by an act of self-transcendance [Selbstaufbebungl : so the law of life decrees.... '>18 Nietzsche then is not asserting that (the) language must be destroyed. Rather he is attempting to make into a problem what he sees as a historical fact. We are no longer able to talk about what is happening to us. Making language questionable, seeing it posed as a problem . is appropriate to and possible in a time when society has been forced into moral behavior patterns which do not admit of expression within the moral logic of the language. 19 For innance. in an example that Nietzsche would have understood perfectly , George Orwell evolved a language, Newspeak, for the world of 1984. His intention was ro develop a form of discourse wh ich rendered morally com patible acts and concepts that in our present understanding are antithetical. The society of Oceania required that Love and Hate, War and Peace no longer be antonyms; it was necessary to claim them both with no feeling of moral contradiction. For that purpose, one had to be able to talk about them . Newspeak was to be the bnguage that filled the necessities of the society: it expressed that which was becoming a sociopolitical fact. That this is in actuality

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possible should be obvious from a short reflection on the army major who had to "destroy the village in order [0 save it," or on the high officials who were able to maintain in the face of the publication of previously secret documents on the development of Vietnam War policy that there was no deceit practiced on the American people. For Nietzsche, words do not mean what one wants them to mean : they mean what they have to mean, if the position and the ideology of the utterer is to be preserved. For Nietzsche, language is involved in making things the same for people, in their commonality and communality. It is also , therefore, a means of enforcing common behavior on individual men. But what it does is enforce a common behavior. Nietzsche is attacking the consequences of the effects of a language on a behavior. There is no reason to assume that he is attacking anything more than the particular forms of communality that this (particular) language enforces. He did not, after all, auack in the same way the communality that was the Greek polis, nor yet the culture of the J/iad. If our language develops in response to our needs, it is for Nietzsche our language and our needs that must be called before the genealogical bar of judgment. The problem Nietzsche is analyzing must not then be seen in "language" itself, but rather in the specific community that (our, Western) language enforces. Language still brings men together, but it is the quality of that union which Nietzsche calls into question. More specifically, Nietzsche sees men trying [0 use language for ends to which it is singularly inappropriate. Language is "properly" suited to the communication of strong feelings, but our language has developed in such a manner that modern men attempt [0 build a community based on thoughts. As we shall see more extensively below, language now separates men from each other, but denies them the knowledge and concreteness of their divorce. Already in the essay on Richard Wagner in Bayreuth Nietzsche writes, " man can no longer make his misery known to others by means of language; thus he cannot really express himself anymore . . . ; language has gradually become a force that drives humanity where it least wishes to go .... The results of this inability to communicate is that the creations of common action .. . all bear the stamp of mutual noncomprehension." 20 That which brings men together now also impedes the consum-

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mation of that union . Instead of life, men have in their language merely the accoutrements of a hollow idol. The genealogical investigation of language reveals to Nietzsche those structures that give us our panicular way of being together. The dissection is of what has slowly evolved as European society. Tbe Stnlcture of Language

What needs, then, does this language serve? What sort of beliefs are necessary? What types of activity must seem natural? In Nietzsche's terms, what "philosophical mythology" is perpetuated and propagated through and by our language? That Nietzsche finds the categories men use and formulate the key to the epistemology of contemporary nihilism is hardly open to doubt. He calls them the "basic cause [Ursacbel of nihilism," and suggests that men have "measured the worth of the world in categories which were founded on a purely imaginary world."ll The first category of epistemology 22 that Nietzsche considers is the "actor-action" distinction. It is also probably the most important. 13 In use, it allows men to separate the "dancer from the dance," the person from (his) activity. Consider what is implied in making the distinction. Person A does action X. Nietzsche sees this division analogous to the distinction of the "real" and the "apparent" world. The action is presumed to be a conditioned part of the actor; the actor acquires a permanence that is not allocated to the action. Judgments can therefore be made about him independently of his activity proper. I shall argue in a later chapter that such judgments are made on imputations to the intentions of the actor. Through them, the actor becomes reified into an entity that has conceptual and potentially moral independence of its acts. He is, so to speak, taken out of the world, and is then dealt with in terms of those idealized categories that the language has so conveniently provided just for such occasions. Thus " popular moralizing divorces strength from the manifestation of strength, as if there were beneath the strong a stratum of indifference able to manifest its strength or not." This reads the actor out of the action - .it places the emphasis on the perpetrator of the action and presumes that he might have done othenvise. An actor can thus be seen as morally responsible

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for his supposed choice, while "'Oer Tater' ist zum Tun bloss binzugedicbtet" - " 'The actor ' is merely a fiction added to the deed ." Obvious examples of this practice are sentences such as "The lightning flashed ." Such propositions are referred to by Nietzsche as a Tun·Tun, a doing-doing. They state the same event twice, once as actor (noun-phrase), once as action (verb-phrase), and presume some meaningful relation between them. One is led to investigate the relationship, and the architecture of tautological air castles begins. For Nietzsche , however, "Das Tun ist alles" - "Doing is all. "1' To Nietzsche, the most important consequence of the actor-action distinction appears to be an overvaluation of consciousness. The actor acquires an ability to separate himself from his acts ; in tum, this makes him a self·reflective subject. Consciousness makes man qua subject a prime mover in his own right ; it tends to fix a supposed correctness on whatever reflexive conclusions the subject may arrive at. The subject becomes "a unity , a entity ," 2S and the conclusions of consciousness are given an unquestioned status. For Nietzsche, this has two important consequences. In the first place, it makes difficult to take into account the possibility that consciousness, even self-consciousness, might merely be, to use the metaphor that Freud was later to make famous , "the top of the iceberg." The tip of the iceberg is not of significantly different material than that which lies under the water, it is merely more visible to creatures who live above the water. So also, consciousness would not, in Nietzsche's understanding, be qualitatively separable from nonconsciousness ; men would simply imagine that since they experience consciousness differently, it is somehow different . The actor-action distinction also gives an imperative toward ahistoricity . For Nietzsche, the lack of acknowledgment of the historical nature of consciousness is a pervasive " hereditary failure" of philosophers due to their tendency to start with the assumed permanence of contemporary man. "In an involuntary fashion man appears as an aeterna veritas . ... " By unquestioned acceptance of the permanence of the products of reflexive consciousness. philosophers are able ·to ignor the effects of historical change dn the nature of the subject. They are led then to see "the last four thousand years as eternal," ignoring that there are "no eternal facts and thus there are no eternal truths." 26 For Nietzsche, the realm of the actor-action distinction is, much like the rest of the world of ideality, an anempt to avoid dealing with me historicity or "giveness" of humanity.

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As usual with Nietzsche, the philosophical point leads to a more anthropological one. His inyestigation and denial of the actor-action distinction leads him not only to reject me epistemology implicit in such a distinction, but [Q assert that such a distinction is maintained in order to give credence to the opinion that there is such a thing as a permanent "human nature." Nietzsche rejects me notion of a "human nature" outside of history: what we now call "human" is for him but the expression of many years of development and does not carry with it ultimate necessity . It must be emphasized that Nietzsche is not saying that there is no such thing as human nature. Rather he asserts that that which has been called human nature is transitory ; the present episode seems to be over two thousand years. 21 In other words, what we had taken as permanent - human nature - is, in Nietzsche's understanding, finally coming to an end. There is probably nothing mat will necessarily replace it; what overwhelms in Nietzsche is his consciousness of standing at the dusky end of a long era, with a less and less positive answer to the question " What is living and what is dead in world history?" There is then finally in Nietzsche an extraordinary modesty about himself and his kind. One tends to overlook this because of titles such as "Why I Am so Wise," "Why I· Write Such Good Books," which organize his autobiography. He is, however, simply refusing to allow man to be the measure of all things. He finds those men wisest whom he praises for "going" under, for recognizing that they are a dying breed . While Nietzsche is nothing if not serious, he does not take himself seriously: as the product of over two thousand years of western cluture, he still can accept that he and all he has represented is coming [Q an end. In a later chapter I shall investigate further the consequences for me moral sphere of the actor-action distinction. Suffice it to note here, that if this distinction be firmly maintained, the punishment of Oedipus (who was after all not " responsible") becomes incomprehensible ; arguments such as " I was only doing my duty" must be accepted as an excuse (i.e., the particular relation of actor [Q acts was such that me actor cannot be held responsible for them) ; and the whole question of unconscious motivation for (for example) criminal activity must remain unexamined . The second epistemological premise which Nietzsche criticizes is free will. In me notes prepared for the drafting of the second volume

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of Human, A1I-Too-Human, he writes that "speech is the way to the belief in freedom of the will." 28 His reasoning seems to be that to speak of free will, it must be apparent that the action of willing makes a perceptible difference in the outside world. If no change is made, or if the change is random, it would no longer make sense to speak of free will. If, for instance, when a person decided to go home again he found that , for no apparent reason , he sometimes made it and sometimes found himself a quantum leap next door, free will would be a meaningless concept. Free will then depends on the consistency of perception of that portion of the world that is not affected by willing. Since perceptions are predominantly formalized through language into an entity with some permanence, it is, in Nietzsche's understanding, through language that the world is structured such that the operation of the will may be visible. Without language, there would be no "facts"; and without "facts," men would not know what they do. 29 The escape from a world of a Heraclitean undifferentiated river of existence thus finds its "surest grounds" in " words and concepts." Through the conceptualizatio'n inherent in speech , the "raging spring torrent" is rransfixed as a frozen river and traversed by bridges. Actions now have results, and willing, consequences, which men are able to describe in terms that other people will understand ; the bridges enable humans to ignore the river, as long as it remains more or less frozen. Thus Nietzsche continues on: "The belief in the freedom of the will ... has in speech its greatest evangelist and prophet. " 30 The doctrine of free will conrributes to the evasion originally made possible by the actor-action distinction. Men tend to think , since they "are" free, that no necessary historical or epistemological chains bind them. If one does not feel tied down to a cerrain form of perception, all that is perceived tends to confirm the belief that men are, in fact, free. We do not feel the "border as border" 11 and are led to accept as all of experience that which is delineated by our epistemological prejudices. Even though, as Nietzsche wrote in the second volume of Human, AII-Too-Human, "each word is a prejudice" and affects spiritual freedom, men feel free, since the world they encounter is the one their prejudices have to a considerable degree elaborated. For Nietzsche, men have walled themselves in a world of their own making and told themselves that they are still

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free. That their consciousness of the borders as barriers has vanished docs not detract from the fact that it is not the only possible world . 32 Freedom of the will becomes a manner of justifying a certain fo rm of life and of assening the legitimacy of that, and only that , over which this fo rm of life has sway. It is thus a manner of preserving a certain pattern of domination and of enforcing a legitimacy for a certain set of horizons, without it ever appearing necessary [Q seek justification for that enforcement. The doctrine of free will is a cunn ing method of preserving the credibility of the ego-cogito. In fact , Nietzsche writes, " ' Freedom of the will ' - that is the expression of a complex state of delight of the person exercising volition ... . What happens here is what happens in every well constructed and happy commonwealth : namely, the governing class identifies itself with the success of the commonwealth ." J3 The political reference is a metaphor to explore. In a "happy commonwealth " the questions that would threaten its basis of ex istence do not get asked; they are shut out beyond the " horizons." They remain outside because the class that defines the commonwealth (in the sense that the aristoi defined an aristocracy, and the demes a democracy) is identified with that which makes the commonwealth what it is. JUSt as there is no reason to call the freedom of the will into quesrion when will produces results with the unquestioned clockwork of a propelled billiard ball striking another, so also is there no reason to call into question the defining function of the "governing classes" as long as the commonwealth meets with successes, as long as the will of the governing class leads to results, or as long as the words used to define the world enable us to deal with that world . Should fai lures become the order of the day, then doubts will arise, horizons will be questioned and grounds will have to be sought . Until then the politics of the situation will be happy. 34 Nietzsche finds the notion of free will an occasionally useful descriptive fiction. Like all the other epistemological categories considered here, it has no ultimate stand ing apart from its use. The danger, for Nietzsche, is that men grant a natural and independent validity to it. In asserting this, it must be remembered that if Nietzsche denies free will, he does not thereby affirm that men are "really" not free. One cannot reject one side of a dialectical proposition without also rejecting the other: Nietzsche's argument rests on

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the proposition that men are never so separate from the world as to be in a position - physical or epistemological - to have or not have free will. Nietzsche criticizes the notion of free will and then investigates what beliefs logically attach themselves to this belief. Most prominent among such beliefs is a third epistemological blight on our understanding. The combination of free will with the notion of the independent subject that arises from the actor-action distinction evolves to the doctrine of causality. Nietzsche writes that " the popular belief in cause and effect is founded on the presupposition that free will is tb"e cause of every effect : it is only from this that we derive the feeling of causality." 3S Here again, Nietzsche's criticism focuses not so much on the heuristic value of the concept, but on the presuppositions of seeing the concept as "real." One should not , he writes, wrongly "Teify 'cause and effect' as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them . now naturalizes in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it 'works' ; one should use 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts , that is to say, as conventional fictions for me purpose of designation and communication - not for interpretation." 36 Were there to be an intellect who could see the flux of events as a continuum. and not as a series of distinguished parts. the concept of cause and effect, indeed . of all conditionality could not exist for him. That one can imagine such a situation, if not actually put oneself into it, indicates for Nietz.sche that it would be "ludicrously immodest" to behave as if the only legitimate conclusions were our own . 37 We may feel the need to use causality as a concept, but that tells us something about us. Here, too , the distinction is enshrined in and by language. "The separation of the 'doing ' from the 'doer,' of happenings from someone who makes happen . of the process from something that is not a process but enduring, a substance thing, body, soul, etc .... the attempt to comprehend happenings (Gescbebenl as a sort of shifting and plac~anging on the pan of a being. of something constant: this ancient mythology established [he belief in 'cause and effect,' after it had found a firm form in [he functions of language and grammar." 38 As always, humans read the "unfamiliar back into the familiar," 39 and derive a feeling of power, comfort, and satisfaction from having understood a new event in terms of die structure that

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ensures them a particular sway over the world. Kant had spoken of the sense of causality as a "natural" feeling ; Nietzsche wants t6 say that it is a response to needs that are hisrorically specific. Our language then enforces a particular and historically specific understanding. If, however, the feeling of causality is recognized as neither actual, nor yet natural , but as a fiction and a historical one at that, " much follows," as Nietzsche puts it with a self-conscious pedantry. 40 "Causes" are "super-added" to events ; in fact , Nietzsche writes, " a necessary sequence of states does not imply a causal relationship between them . ... There are neither causes, nor effect. Linguistically we do not know how to rid ourselves of them . But that does not matter. If I think of the muscle apart from its 'effects,' I negate it."41 To which one might add that if I think of myselfasa subject apart from the world , I negate myself. Nietzsche's move here accepts Hume's analysis of causality, then applies it in a characterisric and strange fashion . Nietzsche explicitly agrees that there is no natural sense of efficient cause , and that habit makes us expect that a certain oft observed occurrence will follow another. That events are made calculable through habit is not a sufficient analysis however ; we must seek below that. In critique of Hume, Nietzsche is interested in the source and nature of the habit . A page after the passage cited above he writes: "The calculability of an event does not reside in the fact that a rule is adhered to , or that a necessity is obeyed , or that the rule of causality has ~en projected by us into every event: it resides in the recurrence of identical cases." The notion of causality is derived then not just from habit, let alone from a sense of causality, as Kant thought, but in fact from historically specific necessities. Men must control the world enough that it appears as a series of classifiable and repeatable events ; without the " familiar to hold on to," men are disturbed ; with it , they are calmed. And , as seen, language is obviously and necessarily the main vehicle producing the "recurrence of similar cases." This criticism of causality is directed not so much against the fact of causality, as against the notion. That causality was not a fact , in the sense that a chair or a mountain were, had been firmly established by Hume. Kant, who had been much concerned with Hume's criticism, had pursued this line and, as Nietzsche sees it, not only had shown that causality was a process of the mind and could not ~ made to inhere in events themselves, but also had delineated the

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realm in which causality could provide a useful and heuristic tool. 42 So far, so good, Bm Nietzsche sees Kant as having attempted to deal with this conclusion by the positing of a Kausalita'ts-Sinn - another Molierian faculty. Here he pursues his radical critique of Kant. "One is surprised," he exclaims sardonically, "one is disturbed, one desires something familiar to hold on to - as soon as we are shown something old in something new, we are calmed, The supposed instinct of causality is only a fear of the unfamiliar and the attempt to discover something known - a search not for causes, but for the familiar," 43 Again Nietzsche sees that Kant analyzed correctly, but that he was kept from pursuing his analysis to its logical limit by a desire to retain a foundatio n for what his sense told him to be rrue, To this effect is discovered the "sense" of causality. Nietzsche's criticism is not against the usefulness of the concept for Erkliirung, but against the conclusion that since man can use the notion of causality, there must be something that causes and something that is effected , Nietzsche tries to show that the notion of subject is the unattended locus of all these problems. In conscious opposition [0 Descartes, he writes in Beyond Good and Evil: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence ' I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove: for example, that it is I that thinks, ' .. that thinking is an operation and an activity on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'I,' finally, that it is already determined what is to be described as 'thought' - that I know what thinking is." 4-4 Men presume, in other words, to take themselves as permanent and real; and, left unquestioned, this prejudice would imprison man as he is. The first realization permitting the "philosophy of the future" must then be the understanding with which the Preface to the Genealogy of Morals begins: "We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge." By making language a problem, Nietzsche gradually leads himself back to the position where men themselves become the problem : he calIs to the bar the fact that they are human-all-toohuman. Thus even man himself does not provide for Nietzsche a firm rock on which one might ground an accurate epistemology. In an im portant section of the Twilight of the Idols he writes: Peoplt havt bdieved at all times that thty kntw what a cause is; but whence . .. o ur faith that wt had slu::h knowledge? .. . We bditved ourselves to

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be: causal in the: act or willing: we: though t that he:re: at lc:ast we: caugh t causality in the: act. Nor did anyone doubt that the antecedents or such an act, its causes, were to be: sought in consciousness and would be found there once sought - as "motivcs": else one would not have bc:c:n rrcc: for nor responsible to it. Finally who would have: denied that thought is caused? [hat the "I" causes the thought?4S

Nietzsche denies it , and for him, no explanation is achieved by tracing "effects" back to some mental "cause." The conscious intention of the ego is a familiar fact - and , for that reason, is most unknown to the knower. Here again, Nietzsche has traced the problem back to what I might call psycho-anthropological roots. The soil of the problem is human beings themselves. It is compounded by the fact that men assume they have knowledge of themselves. The paradoxical claim that " we are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge" must, in light of the above, be read with the Genealogy in part as a rumination on how far men have been removed from themselves, and how great the task of "bringing something home" is to be. It is, however, only through the alienation in which "each is furth est from himself" that men will ever be able to recover themselves. The opposition is again to Kant. No more is metaphysics the "queen of the sciences"; Kant's attempted rejuvenation of that "outcast and forsaken matron" fails. Now, rather, the " path to fundamental problems is psychology."46 Human beings must deal with lbnnsdves as the source of the problem . The same metonymic fault noted previously occurs also in the relation of human beings to themsehres. Men stamp something an event, take the imprint to be real, then seek on the model of their creation 10 build the rest of the world, which would follow logically from the 'initial minting. One traces effects back [0 conscious intentions, assumes that the reality of self-consciousness is given and true, and assumes thereby to have explained an event. What has been done is far more dangerous: in effect men have read themselves out of the world. By making intention the efficient cause of an event the subject is removed from the deed. But, asks Nietzsche, is not the intention " the event itself?" 47 With this statement we have moved again back from the purely epistemological considerations. Nietzsche would show us that our epistemology, with aU its problems, does not rest on a few mistakes which, if properly analyzed, can be cleared up. Our epistemology

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~sts in us; we incarnate it, so to speak. Thus any significant change in epistemology will have to be a change in the sorts of human beings who maintain themselves with this particular epistemology and all of its distinctions between actors and action, causes and effect, and so forth . We shall see later just how radical a change this must be.

Trutb and Conseque11ces

Language pulls together and is the world : tbis language , tbis world , these men. The ability to give names - to extend the control of language over the world - must then be a masterly trait: it consists of saying what the world .is. The reverse proposition will also be accurate: knowledge of the power of language may lead to a prohibition on the use of o=rtain names. The Old Testament prohibits, for instano=, mentioning the " terrible name of God .,, 4B To name is to define and to bring under control, to give the determination of the being of the object in question . The allocation of names creates the world in the image of he who names. Such cteations are properly termed meta-pboTS (beyond-carriers) . They are artifacts which carry an intellectual proo=ss beyond the mind into the world . Nietzsche's analysis is remarkably close to that of Marx and Freud . Both Freud and Marx develop the cono=pt of fetishism; for both , a man-made object is endowed by its human creator with a power and right of control. The object becomes a " natural" force , and turns back on its creator. In Totem and Taboo, a primal band of brothers kill and devour a sexually dominating father, only to see the cycle of mastership repeated as one of them emerges the new father. They eventuaJly find it neo=ssary to take fatherhood out of the world and render it inaccessibly by a forbidden name. Thus was born God , religion, and civilization. For Marx, men mix their labor with nature in order to make a commodity, then buy and sell the commodity on a market, convinced that it is in the order of things that commodities be bought for a price other than the value of the labor with which they created it. In both cases, that which is a human c~ation is taken to be something wonderful, inaccessible, and out of man's control. Nietzsche's word for the result of this process in appropriately idol. It is his conviction of their "twilight" that informs the destructive side of his writing. As early as the essay On Trutb and Lie in tbe

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Extra-Moral Sense (1873), he had begun to work out the process by which idols come to be consecrated. Truth is conceived of as metaphor, and, as Nietzsche notes in The Gay Science, "unspeakably more depends on what things are called, than on what they are. The reputation, the name and appearance, the importance ... of a thing - in origin most frequently an error and arbitrariness, thrown over things like a garment, and quite foreign to their essence (Wesen] and even to their exterior - have gradually by belief therein and its growth from generation to generation, grown, so to speak, on-to and into a thing and have become its very body." 49 The metaphors which first lie on life like a light cloak become an iron cage; Weber had noted the same about the protestant ethic. That which had enabled men to make the world rich to themselves - since these imagined worlds are "necessary" so - is gradually "enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically and ... after long use seems firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people : truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are ; metaphors which are worn out and without senuous power ; coins wh ich have lost their picture and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins." 51 This " mythological basis of action" is problematic. Nietzsche believes that the logic of fetishism or idolatry wears the metaphors out and makes the idols hollow. Thus, the exposure of the shabby origin of these values - their mesquine Herkunft - makes the universe appear to be without sense. The foundations of the world are revealed to have no more ontological status than anything else. But , the illusions and metaphors made are necessary . Survival requires communication and thus language and consciousness; without them there "would have long ago been nothing more (of mankind). " 52 And , to further complicate matters, while these illusions are necessary , and now have revealed themselves as idols and no longer gods, one would be a " fool" to think "it would be enough here to rder to this origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order to annihilate that which virtually passes for the world, namely so-called ' reality.' '' Sl This is the same problem that came up in the previous chapter. It is perfectly true that men live in a world which at one point was to a great degree their making. To say that the world is therefore an "illusion" is accurate, as long as one accepts that without this illusion

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there would have been no world . For Nietzsche, there is no " real" world underlying this one, no Sleeping Beauty to be awakened by a single epistemological kiss. The world as it appears is an adjusted and simplified world in which practical reason works. We "Jive in it and this is our proof of its truth." Nietzsche continues on: "Our particular case is interesting enough: we have made a conception in order to live in a world, in order to perceive just enough that we may endure it." S4 Of course "our" world makes some sense; we cannot imagine ourselves not making some sense. But this is no proof of anything beyond the fact that men have established working circles of events. Hence the problem will .not simply be to expose the fact that men " alone have devised cause, sequences, for each other, relativity [!l) , constraint, number, law, freedom. motive, and purpose," and mixed and projected this symbol-world into things as if it existed in itself. Men have to do this. or something like it. But the particular language seems to be the-problem , now, and for these men. "Suppose," writes Nietzsche, "we have finally reached the conclusion that there is nothing good or evil in itself; but rather that these are qualities of the soul, which lead us to cover with such words things both inside and outside us. We have taken back the predicates from things ; or we have at least recollected that we merely lent the things these predicates. Let us be careful that this insight does not cause us to lose the faculty of lending and that at the same time we do not become wealthier and more avaricious." ss It is not just that men impose reality on events, but what happens after they do. The problem is, as Nietzsche writes in a section called "Only as Creators." that annihilation is only possible through creation. To escape from the prison of this world . all must be made new. Latlguage and Nihilism

If there is nothing wrong in general with dividing the world up into fictitious categories. what then is wrong with the panicular manner in which men have done it? Nietzsche is certainly not saying that any manner is as good as any other. even though all manners are errors. Suppose even that as Nietzsche says, "We will not be rid of our belief in God until we have abandoned our faith in grammar." Is this necessarily so bad that one should get upset enough to spend other

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than philoso phi~al time on it? Why should men not be happy to rest uncomfortably in " the shadows of the dead God," since, as Nietzsche continually repeats, there is, in fact, no permanent resting place for "truth ?" If Nietzsche is to do more than expose, he must believe that other forms of language and life are possible, and that his exposures of the prejudices of this one might overcome its problems. The ultimate answer requires an analysis of eternal return . It is possible, however. to give some preliminary indications. Nietzsche finds that men have thought that they always possessed consciousness. Since it has not been a problem fo r them, they have given themselves very little trouble in its acquisition. In particular. they have not attempted to acquire a given type of consciousness, but have merely allowed that which was around to determine theirs. as if it were the only possibility. Th us "it is an entirely new problem just dawning on the human eye and hardly yet plainly recogn izable to embody knowledge in ourselves and make it instinctive, a problem which is only seen by those who have grasped the fact that hitherto our errors alone have been embodied in us, and that all our consciousness is relative (Q errors." 56 Two preliminary indications appear in this statement. First. it seems that the problem that Nietzsche sees facing humanity will be that of "embodying knowledge" and "making it instinctive." He had already argued in the second of the Untimely Considerations that humanity 's present " nature" had been itself acquired through such an embod iment. How this process is to work wiU occupy much of Nietzsche's work and thought fo r the rest of his life. Secondly. it appears that there is some structure inherent in the ways men have approached the world which leads them to develop a life composed only of errors. 57 Again . in the essay On tbe Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, Nietzsche finds that "our whole being is divided mechanica lly into an inner and outer side, ... such that we suffer from the malady of words and have no trUSt in any feeling not yet stamped with words .... This ... life is sick and must be healed." S8 The sickness of understanding results from the fact that the present method of approaching knowledge is such that men can never be content , and it is this approach that ultimately makes a satisfying answer impossible. All searches for causes, for subjects, are moral searches in the sense that they attempt to uncover who or

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what is responsible for things being as they are. In its essence a regressus in infinitum,59 "knowledge" is ultimately a moral ideology which men apply the better to survive. AU poines at which they stop in the search for truth are those that they take (temporarily) as obviously true. The search for a stopping point will thus be ceaseless. If one person or school were to stop philosophizing, another must pick it up. This search for responsibility is ultimately fueled by a moral imperative; it operates in consciousness; thus consciousness will not be able to refrain from applying the same moral energy to itself. In an imponant passage: dated specifically June 10, 1887, as if he had finally gotten something right, Nietzsche writes : But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness: this eventually turned against morality, discovered its leleology, ilS prejudiced linteressiertJ perspective. and now the recognition of this long incarnate leingefleiscbt l mendacity that one despairs of geuing rid of, worlu as a stimulant. To nihilism, Now we discover in ourselves needs implanted by a long understanding of morality, which now appear to us as needs for unuuth ; o n the other hand, these

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antagonism - not to esteem what we know and not to be Qllowed any longer to value those lies we would tell o urselves - results in a process of dissolution. 60

Thus, the desire to found knowledge on truth results in a gradual undermining of that which might serve as a basis for truth . As more and more is unmasked, the flux of the world increases until the river becomes a raging torrent which carries all away. 61 The will to truth will, when applied to itself, question those foundations that made it possible. As Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, it does not imply that "I will not allow myself to be deceived," but rather, "there is no other alternative, I will not deceive, not even myself." As noted above, "great things perish of their own accord." Here the structure by which men have sought truth has finally turned against and unmasked the system of truth itself. That which erected truth has finally destroyed its own creation. The will to trum carries a perverse necrophilia. If life is in fact appearance and there is no " truth" to be reached , the defense of the will to truth is the assertion of the ultimate validity of a man-made perspective. There is, in fact, no reason that "truth" should be preferred. To affirm it is then to affirm a moral system, that men should live like this. This leads Nietzsche to speculate on the possi·

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biliry that there might lie in the will to truth a "concealed will toward death." 62 Freud was to say no less in Civilization and its Discontents. What, then, is the epistemology of nihilism? The hidden linguistic imperatives of the categories men now live under force them toward nothingness. Since nihilism is the end stage of such a process, it too must be an ultimate state of morality. Men arrive at it , in Nietzsche's understanding, when tbey find botb tbat there is no truth, and tbat tbey shouJd continue to seek it. The will to truth drives men even further into the void, and that they may now recognize it as void is no help. As Nietzsche notes at the very end of the GeneaJogy of Morals , "man would rather will the void , than be void of wilL" Here, then, is the position the epistemology arrives at: the present structure of huma" understanding forces men to continue searching for that which their understanding tells them ;s not to be found. This is the epistemology of nihilism. This is no longer simply the " problem" of metaphysics that Kant has noted, subjected [Q analysis, and found not [Q be responsible for itself. Since Nietzsche has refused the succor of the realm of theoretical reason , the problems of truth must be found in practical reason. This latter. now detached from any possible link [Q a purer world , is a human responsibility : the contradictions are ours, and not just inherent in the relations between the theoreti cal and practical world . As noted above. for Nietzsche the " faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism." That men continue to believe that the world should be meaningful, though unable [Q discover anything they might recognize as a satisfactOlY mean ing, is the consequence of their inability [Q admit that the problem lies in themselves. Nietzsche's dictum that one "cannot endure the world , though one does not want to deny it ," 63 becomes a comment not, as it was for Kant , on the structures of reason, but on the human (all-too-human) condition. The unmasking enterprise which is genealogy is part of the growth of nihilism . The ulcers are finally bleeding, men know they have more than a sto mach ache. The analysis of epistemology has shown Nietzsche that th e categories of reason men use have progressively removed th em from the world . This language has given men only "bloated idols"; and the fetishes and spider webs of ideality no longer refer to a sensuous world_ Ril ke seized upon thi s divorce in one of his letters.

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Even for our grandparents a " house," a " well," a familiar towe r, their very clothes, their COat, were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate ; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. No w ... empry indifferent things are pouring across ... , sham things, dummy life .. . ; a house [now1 , ... an Ipple or I grapevine, ... has nOlhing in common with the house, the fruit, the: grape into which went the hopes and renections of our forefathers. ... Live thin!:, things live Ind conscious of us, Ire running OUt and can no longer be replaced.

If, as Hegel once remarked , "in the dark, all cows are black," our language has, in Nietzsche's estimation, manifested that darkness. He writes to understand and annihilate it.

Interlu de: Tbe Pbilosopberas Physician of Language, Nietzscbe and Wittgenstein

Throughout this chapter and the previous one it has been possible to illustrate many of Nietzsche 's points through citations from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This parallel has been noted before, fo r both share the concern with the hold that language has on life. Both, too, write in a philosophically unconventional manner. Generally, however, the parallels between them have redounded to the philosophical benefit of Wittgenstein ; for instance, in The Birth of Tragedy, it is only allowed that Nietzsche had some " insights." Articles drawing this link have generally contented themselves with the " pointing" approach: "See, this looks like th is." 6S It is possible, however , to bring the writers together in such a way that their mutual reso nan ce opens new understanding of each man. Nietzsche, of course, could not have known Wittgenstein . Wittgenstein , on the other hand , had apparently read some Nietzsche ; he refers in the Brown Book to the doctrine of eternal return. Both writers share a co mmon appreciation fo r Schopenhauer, whom Wittgenstein once defended against Carnap's depreciation to the astonished Vienna Circle. And , substantively, though a considerable portio n of Wittgenstein 's work is oriented (Oward specific problems and questions in the philosophy of language , he quickly found it necessary to move in what I might call a more anthropological direction . That he did so (in the Philosophical In vestigations) is an indication that the writers share an appreciarion that language cannot be under-

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stood except in terms of its relation to the human condition. The symmetry in their perspective will refl ect my understanding of their common intent: to re-cover th e world, so that it be again livable. Late in the Investigatio ns, Wittgenstein writes, "that which is to he accepted - the given one might say - is fo rms of li fe."66 In On Certainty, a book on wh ich he was working at the time of his death, he notes: " You must bear in mind that the language game is so to spea k something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds [ist nicbt bcgriindetJ . It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It stands there - like our life." 67 Assuming the two quotes can be linked, he seems to mean something like this. A form of life, be it our existence , or a game that we play , is in general not subject to justification. By virtue of what it is, it "stands there." The categories " reasonable," " unreasonable." "logical" (predictable"), "illogical," simply do no t apply. There is no sphere or category of reason which might provide a foundation for them. The concern is repeated throughout Wittgenstein's life and career. Are there grounds fo r statements? What is the basis for taking something to be the case? And, during the course of his "philosophical jo urneys, " as he called them, he came to the conclusion that at a certain point justification is exhausted. One has reached " bedrock: the spade is turned ." And at such times, one is inclined to simply say: "This is what I do." This passage from On Cmaimy probably consciously echoes Luther before the diet of Worms: "Here I stand , I can do no other.'>68 After all explanations and justifications. one is left with the "form of life" - the ubensform - which is not itself sub ject to justification. It is rather, as Wittgenstein wrOte in On Cmoillty. a "world picture" which is "part of a kind of mythology." For me, Wittgenstein here is loo king about in the same manner as did Nietzsche. Any proposition is possible if and only if we acknowledge as given, " real," and unquestioned some foundation for our knowledge. Some unjustified grounds have to be recogn ized and acknowledged as the basis of our knowledge : in the end, remarks Wittgenstein , " knowing depends on acknowledging. " 69 A certain form of life makes (a certain) knowledge possible. The acceptance of a form of life thus "designates the form of the account that we give, the way in which we look at things. " 10 He sh ares with Nietzsche the notion that the grounds of a statement appear as " real ," that is , having natural foundation , even though they don't have one " in

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fact." The grounds " appear to have the form of an empirical proposition ," but I can only "discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast , but the movement around it determines its immobility ." 71 As in Nietzsche, the grounds for a proposition are not subject to the rules they establish . In a passage I have mentioned before, Wittgenstein notes: "There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is a meter long, not that it is not a meter long, and that is the standard meter in Paris." 12 If it were to properly be (or not be) a meter long it would have (Q be long in terms of something else. However, it is not a meter long, it is a meter. It simply stands there and different words have to apply to it. Men tend, however. with what Stanley Cavell has called " a philosophical tic," to want to refer to it as a meter long. Why such obstinacy? For Wittgenstein, it is because men want the certainty of a single form. "This word forces itself upon you," writes Wingenstein in an attempt (Q bring out the mode of compulsion. " It is just a single form which forces the expression upon us." 73 Thus, for Wittgenstein. we are "held captive" by a particular manner of perceiving, by a "picture," and we "cannot get outside of it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably:' 74 The nature of the compulsion that language controls us by is seen by Wittgenstein to be one of repetition : the same structures and functions keep coming back in everything that we do as we use the language. In the crude analogy I have used before. epistemologically language is like the capitalist mode of production which recurs constantly in capitalist societies, or like slave morality which reappears as the form of moral interaction under any number of empirical cloaks. Wittgenstein is quite clear, for instance. that our notion of identity seems to be expressed and to exist only in language, " Essence is expressed by grammar." When we call objects by the same words in the same language, we tend to "arbitrarily" take rules as expressing intrinsic necessities. In apparently denying that even logic is something in any sense "sublime," Wittgenstein goes beyond all those apparently intrinsic necessities which in language are "essences," be these versions of Platonic forms, or Kantian transcendental categories. Almost echoing Nietzsche's statements tying the belief in God (Q the faith in grammar, Wittgenstein sees "theology as grammar." 75

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Language holds us captive in the pictures it draws. We think of them as necessary, but "what looks as if it bad to exist, is part of the language ." 76 Wittgenstein occasionally calls this the "ideal" which, "as we think of it , is unshakable. You can never get outside of it; you must always tum back. There is no outside; outside there is no life air ILebenslu[t1 - whence all this: The idea sits on our nose like a pair of glasses, and we see what we see through them. It never occurs to us to take them off." 77 The language chosen in the initial ironic sequence is revealing and informative. There is no "air" to give us "life" outside the world which is the present construction of our life. This is not a denial that there may be other outsides, and thus, so to speak, other worlds. However, for Wittgenstein as for Nietzsche, from the perspective of a world, in this language, there is nothing else. When it occurs to us to take off the glasses which have shaped what we have seen, we have efficiently questioned these premises about which we previously had no thoughts. Glasses, for Wittgenstein, and horizons, for Nietzsche, are necessary ; but they are not transcendental. The danger for Wittgenstein is the danger for Nietzsche. By leaving the glasses on, men understand everything in terms of them . Such is a "main cause of philosophical disease - a one sided diet: one nourishes one's thinking through only one kind of example." 78 By making us focus on only one kind of thing, our language in fact bewitches us, and rakes us from the realm of everyday life to the realm of metaphysics. 79 Wittgenstein is then concerned to break the hold a language has on relations with the world. It leads us around by the nose, removing our life-world and replacing it with a "house of cards." Through the "bewitchment of our intelligence," we are given an " urge" to misunderstand;80 in fact, when we do philosophy, "we are like savages, primitive peoples who hear the expressions of civilized men , put a false interpretation on them and then draw the queerest [seltsamJ conclusions from it."8t This, then, is the famous "fly bottle"; we, then, are the flies whom Wittgenstein would show the way out. For Nietzsche, the fly bottle is a web. Both are devices for catching insects, driven and lured willy-nilly in a direction which, even if they think at all, they seem to have no choice but to follow. Release from the attraction of the fly bottle requires a "discovery ... that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question . . .. " 8Z The old problem of metaphysics, first encountered by

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Kant, is seen by Wingenstein as that which must simply be eliminated. Metaphysics, in fact philosophy, is for Kant , Nietzsche. and Wiugenstein a species of inquiry which seems to finish self-destructively. The solution that Kant finds is not acceptable to either Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. Kant attempts a reconciliation between the intellect and life; for the two later writers these two seem to contradict each other. I understand giving "philosophy peace" to mean the development of an understanding such that it simply no longer occurs or appears necessary to us to raise che questions that philosophy raises. Our form of life would not require it; such questions have become "un-questioned." To achieve "peace" requires a method that allows men to stop doing philosophy when "they want to," a rele~ from a continuous imperative ro continue searching for that which we now know cannot be found. For Wittgenstein. a release from philosophizing. For Nietzsche, an overcoming of nihilism. The parallel of rele~ is established, 83 btl( it is still not dear what this may mean. "There is not a philosophical method ," Wittgenstein says in a famous passage in the Investigations , " though there are methods , like different therapies." Properly conceived, philosophy can be something like a therapy; it will remove dise~. There are many diseases, many therapies, but never a magic staff. The analogy, as old as Plaro, is of the utmost importance. If the task of philosophy is to liberate us from the "ideals" that keep us captive, and thus free us from the tyranny of an absolute world picture, philosophy is not therefore in the business of providing us with answers, any more than the task of the therapist is to provide us with explanations rather than cures. Failing answers, the task of the philosopher is still that of Socrates to put himself out of business. Nietzsche here also wished the "overcoming of philosophers, through annihilation of the world of being." 84 The therapy envisaged abandons the " world of being" in which answers are wrought and sought. Instead of providing answers it attempts to bring matters down to eanh. This is the depth of meaning of "ordinary language philosophy" 8S as Wittgenstein conceived of it: to show man with complete clarity where he is living. Such therapy is begun, for Wittgenstein as for Nietzsche, by revealing as prejudices those structures of language and perception that had always seemed so real. The most important, writes Wittgenstein , are

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" hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to see something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all, unless that fact has sometime struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, on(X seen , is most striking and powerful. " 86 The task is to show us what we ordinarily do, but in such a manner that it strikes US, or seems even a little queer. This is not a matter simply of explanation; rather, "description alone" must be the task. Wittgenstein takes words and concepts, 40d shows them to us in a context - a "language game " - which makes it perfectly clear what exactly is meant and said at that panicular time by that particular person . At this point we see what the word is; the understanding is with abso lute clarity ; there are no more questions to ask than there are of the answer to a riddle. The tools of " the language game" make this possible. These are "clear and simple" artifacts in which all the component parts are known and under control. It is wrong to think that Wittgenstein is trying here to construct a pure or universalized language ; he is not even attempting to " regularize" language, as some of his detractors or supporters would argue. 87 Rather a language game is "objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the fact of our langu,; not only by way of simi larities, but also of dissimilariIn this sense,8? language games are not descriptions of ties." reality, but a set of " thought experiemnts," designed the better to help us see the life world around us. They are "so to speak a measuring rod , not a prejudice [Vorurteil] to which reality must correspond ." A language game by itself does not explain reality, nor does it describe the world ; rather, it re-arranges the world that it may be the better described . "These are, of course," says Wittgenstein, " not empirical problems ; they are rather solved by looking at the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them . "file problems are solved not by the giving of new information, but by arranging what we have always known."90 As with a jigsaw puzzle, the problem is to see appropriately. The language game thus strikes me as occupying a position in this manner of doing philosophy analogous to the genealogical investigation of Nietzsche. Both are constructed tools. No pretense is made that they somehow describe the empirical world (which is not to say

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that they do not make the empirical world available). Both are used to shed light on those portions of men's lives which , from either moral prejudice, or habit, from needs or for self-protection, they do not confront fact to face. Both attempt new illumination of that which appears to men, an illumination such that the objects in question are made present in a new manner. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, while the historical usefulness of particulat language games and particular investigations is supposed, the historical accuracy. in the. sense of representing the "facts," is not . Both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are interested in what makes the facts as they are . Thus, in which might appear otherwise to be a puzzling passage, Wittgenstein can write: " If the formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we not be interested, not in grammar , but rather in that nature which is the basis of grammar?" Here Wittgenstein has set up a potential socio-historical critique of his manner of investigating the world: if the world generates concepts, "should we not" investigate the world . His answer follows immediately. " Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concept and very general facts of nature. (Such fa cts mostly do not strike us because of their very generality.) But our interest does not fall back on these problems of the formation of concepts ; we are not doing natural science, nor yet natural history - since we can invent fictitious natural history for our purposes. " 91 Thus also will Nietzsche place the argument in On tbe Use and Disadvantage of History for Life . He argues that the historian creates "an artistically, not a historically true picture. " " In this sense," he continues, " to think objectively of history is the quiet work of the dramatist: namely to think one thing into anoth er and weave the elemer.t inw a whole: all with the presumption that the unity of plan must be put into tbings, if it is not already there . .. . There could be a manner of writing history which contained not the slightest drop of co mmon empirical truth and could still claim to be called in the highest degree objective." 9z The cure - to return to the medical analogy - effectuated by this therapy will be to remove the disease. Here again the analogy is instructive. First, the diagnosis. For Nietzsche, the purpose of the investigations he undertakes is "to understand these truisms from witb;n and to translate them into a doctrine for one's own use through personal experience." Only this will give us the "clear vision " which will allow us to see that this life is "sick ... from

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many diseases" and must be "hea1ed."91 For Wingenstein, philosophy reaches "results" when one or another piece of "disguised nonsense" is uncovered as "plain" or "patent " nonsense, such that one sees " the bumps that the understanding has got by running up its head against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of discovery.,,94 Once diagnosed, the cure is affected by the removal of the disease: therapy consists not of completing a sequence once begun ("answering a question"), but of eliminating the sequence (by showing "disguised nonsense" as " patent nonsense"). Therefore, for both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, the problem is to find a form of life in which men no longer incarnate only those errors that make for their destruction. This incarnation was nihilism in Nietzsche, and the prison of the search for the "ideal" in Wingenstein. A change in incarnation, however, is a transfiguration , a becoming new, an alteration in form of life. In an otherwise perplexing passage in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics , Wittgenstein writes: "The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and it was possible for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured only through a changed mode of thought, not through a medicine i.nvented by an individual. " 95 The suggestion in both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche seems to be that if it should prove that the disease is so rooted in the very stuff of human life, then the corresponding therapy will have to be nothing less than to change that "mode of life." What a change in " mode of life" or in what is "h uman-all-roo-human " means is not immediately accessible without an understanding of eternal return . The language game and the genealogical investigation are analogous and are in the service of a similar purpose: the liberation of men from the unknown chains that bind them prisoner to a particular and destructive manner of viewing the world. They are different in that the genealogy is a potentially far more complex tool because it attempts to give a description that is not only synchronic (of the harmonic structure, one might say if this were a piece of music) but also diachronic (of the line development , to continue musically). Wittgenstein certainly understood the need to do this ; many passages in On Certainty stand witness. 96 He never finally accomplished it. Conversely, the genealogy in Nietzsche's hands often remains a crude, if powerful instrument. Weber was to take some further steps. It remains an unfinished task, however. Both men do finally point to an immediate and central problem. If

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the philosopher is to make health possible. he will fi rst have to be healthy himself. Zarath ustrOl fi rst must cure himself of many sicknesses before he can even hear and understand his own teaching. By the beginning of the third book he is no more than convalescent. For Wittgenstein. the philosopher is a " man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding before he can arrive at notions of sound human understanding. At the beginning of his journey. Zararh ustra queries: "Must one smash their ears, before they learn to listen with their eyes?" Wittgenstein. more directly and simply. expostulates, " Don 't think, but look and see!"97 To hear, or to thin k as men do, is to use the categories of that reason by which one has structured the world and [0 perpetuate a vicious circle from which one cannot look and see our. Both men are saying that what one needs to know can be known, if only one is the person ro see it.

Chapter IV THE PSYCHOSOCIOLOGY OF ETHICS: THE BASIC TREND OF MORALITY What is involved bere is tbat in world b i!tory so mething else rt$ults fro m tbe actions of men tban that wbich tbey intend and achieve, sometbing else tbtm tbal they know or 'Want. They acco mplish (heir inurest; but some· tbing else is accomplished, whicb was implied in it, but which was not in t be conscio usness (md tbe intentions of tbe actors. - Hegel. Philosophy of History

Comme jt descer/dais des fleuv es impassibles je ne me sen /is plu s guide par les baleurs; Des Peaux-Ro uges Crlards les avaient prjs po ur cibles Les ayant doues nus (lUX poteaux de co uleuTs.

- Rimbaud, I. e bateau ;'llre

In Nietzsche's u ndersta nding a system of human interact ion is importantly shaped and maintained by language ; only thus can a society, the relations of friend s, and the self-con scious knowledge one might have of oneself be maintained. Insofar as a

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particular existence can be understood, it can only be understood in language, with the words and grammar, the epistemology, that make up that language. And, since there is no knowledge or recognition of others or of self without an appropriate language, if one understands that language, one also can understand what it is to be a human being who speaks that language. A second point follows on the first: since language is the structure in which a system of interactions is maintained, language is only practical; there cannot be a " pure " language, which would refer to a realm other than itself.' For Nietzsche, the necessary impurity of the means by which men understand themselves and others places humans irrevocably and definitely in the world . No matter how much one is tempted [0 escape, no matter how attractive the assurances of the idea l, no matter what tools one seeks out, there will be no escape from the givenness of our particular conditiori, fo r there is nowhere to escape to. We have only ourselves, even though our epistemology, Nietzsche argues, leads us to avoid that recognition. As such, language must become for Nietzsche the embodiment of a particular moral system. As we saw, he refers to the "philosophical myth ology" which lies hidden in the deep structure of a language and which is maintained by our desire to see it as reaL Men are seduced - the word is appropriately erotic and blind - toward the ideal, to embrace the particular way they act as, in imagined fact, the only way. For Nietzsche, the basis of a language hides a moral system. It controls what is permitted to appear on stage as an actor, and what must seem inappropriate or rude. Divergences in moral conclusions may therefore reflect not just disagreement, but in fact the conflict of tWO opposite moral grammars. After a certain point, the rranslation of the actions one person undertakes into terms comprehensible to another must come to an end. Wittgenstein notes in the Investigations that at certain times, one simply has to say " this is what I do. " Portions of languages may make contact, and of course, forms of life do interact meaningfully. But as wholes, be these English and Chinese, or the languages of morality and teaching, they are separated. This is only as it must be: they may meet on a bias, so to speak, but were they to be in principle completely commensurab le, they would be so in terms of something; this would then become the "real world." While Kant found he could make this move, Nietzsche sees it only a phantom called up to keep a particular world in order.

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There seems to be here a direct implication, often accepted by commentators, that Nietzsche is some sort of cultural relativist. Autre temps, autre moeurs: we have ours, they have theirs, and that is just the way it is. Such however is not Nietzsche 's position . As a preliminary step toward demonstrating this. it is useful and pleasing to clear up a debate current among Nietzsche scholars. I replay it here partly because it helps advance the argument toward the problem of cultural relativism, and partly because it is indicative of the problems of approaching Nietzsche as if he should fit into the great categories of Western thought. In my understanding, the problem under examination here - Did Nietzsche have or have not a coherent doctrine of epistemology? - centers around questions which, if properly viewed , disappear. Arthur Danto, an American philosopher, has recently argued that all of Nietzsche's ideas can be seen as related to a central epistemological position which he refers to as that of a "semantical nihilist and a non-cognitivist in ethics...2 Without accepting for himself all of what he sees to be Nietzsche's conclusions, he can conclude that Nietzsche's epistemological ventures do indeed have a coherent and instructive validity in themselves. To reduce Damo 's argument, it seems to imply something like this. For Nietzsche, most of what men understand as moral and metaphysical problems are in fact not problems at all, but merely the consequences of confused and selfserving manners of thinking. If they were to clean up the detritus of the ages and speak straight , most moral differences would be shown to rest on other differences. In themselves, they would prove evanescent. The position is curiously like that of an existential Hume; perhaps even Ayer or Weldon in the current philosophical fraternity of modern positivism might admit some kinship with it. "If only people used language as it was intended" becomes a lament, which, if repeated enough, might serve to cleanse the Augean stables of metaphysics.} All of this is useful enough ; it does point out thal epistemological concerns run very deep in Nietzsche ; it does presume that the root of many problems we have can best be shown in an examination of language. But it misses the basic point. Language is intended. Therefore it cannot be understood apart from an understanding of those who intend it. The other side of this fence in epistemology is occupied by men sharing the same field as Karl Jaspers. He notes accurately that Nietzsche sees the world to be non-structured and ultimately chaos.

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Therefore, he concludes, apparently quite sensibly. Nietzsche must realize that epistemology is impossible. The science of knowledge must require an object ; the object is not there, thus the science flees also. 4 This view acquires strong support from Nietzsche's own statements on the subject . If. as he claims in the Preface to On The Genealogy of Morals, men of knowledge "must be unknown to themselves," this certainly implies that epistemology cannot be pushed beyond a certain point. Such, however (and here Jaspers betrays his rraditional and Christian perspective), does not mean that epistemologies are not possible. Some are bener and some worse than others, though they will of course be so in terms of something that is neither epistemo logical rules, nor the accuracy of their descriptio n of the "real world." Nietzsche does object to the notion that a "good " epistemology might provide one with a privileged philosophical resting point.

Cultural Relativism and Beyond

The above considerations still seem to move Nie tzsche in the direction of relativism. He appears to have linked epistemology fi rmly to moral practice and to have consequently asserted the ultimate equality of moral systems. A more careful look at his practice reveals however that the conclusion does not necessarily follow. Nietzsche never engages in a comparison of moral practices. It is not useful to him to draw relations of similarity and difference between Western and Buddhist or Hindu moral systems. Such surface comparisons must be necessarily misleading and ge nerally erroneous; they lead only to the obvious conclusion that the overt morality of one culture is occasionally the guilty sin of another. It is conceivab le that such comparisons could become as complicated as functionalist anthropology sought to become in the period following Nietzsche's death (and still seeks to be). But the search for the particular content of "leadership fu nctions" in various societies begged the question that Nietzsche knew and posed very well: Where might these "functions" come from? Whose funct ions are they? What needs do they serve? Are they really written in an anthropological book of laws, or are they only an idea; if so, whose? If Nietzsche does not escape from cultural relativism, he will be repeating the same error that he so

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Strongly attacked in Kant. He will have posited an ideal world such that one can continue to arrive at desired conclusions, here a world of "functions." Nietzsche instead seeks to go below the surface and empirical manifestations of moral systems, while refusing himself the ultimate comfort of a " pure" realm of morality. This is genealogy; Nietzsche is not concerned with moral behavior or the diverse practical manifestations of a supposed categorical imperative, but rather with the genetic origins of morality, the soil it springs out of.s " Master morality," for instance , describes for Nietzsche not the moral practices of masters, bur the structure of a particular type of action. Hence all descriptions of the empirical aspects of a particular moral system will reveal nothing about that which is constitutive and basic. " Perhaps," writes Nietzsche, "there is no more important proposition for all manner of historiography than this one - which though reached with great difficulties, must still be reached , that the actual causes of a thing's origin and its subsequent usefulness, its factual incorporation into and organization in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart .. .. No matter how well we understand the usefulness of some physiological organ (or a legal institution, an artistic genre, a social custom , a political usage, an artistic or a cultic trait) we still have understood nothing regarding its origin. ' >6 By breaking back through the empirical manifestations of a particular moral code (the "subsequent usefulness "), Nietzsche's intention is to uncover the origin, while recognizing full well that there is no obvious link between the two. Since, however, the origin lives on in the event , he will by the act of unmasking have discovered what necessities are being served; this will tell him something about the men who have those necessities, something about the form of life in question. He is thus not "exposing" morality in a crude and simple manner. To claim, as he does in Tbe Twilight of tbe Idols , that " morality belongs to the realm of the psychology of error, " where cause and effect are confused, or that truth is confused with " the effects of believing something to be true,'" is not to deny that it has served a certain form of life. These may have been "false values," but "one must understand that they had to exist: they are the results of causes (Ursacbenl which have nothing to do with premises (GriindenJ ." s For Nietzsche, "false" premises are the only kind of premises there are. Men require the veil of illusion {what Nietzsche refers to as the

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apollonian) in order to survive and maintain a form of life. Morality is thus a necessary lie for humans , without which man never would have evolved a human form but would have remained a beast. These considerations do move Nietzsche away from the cultural relativists. It is certainly true that, as Zarathustra proclaims , "a tablet hangs over (he head of each people," and equally true th at morality is "a system of value judgments concerned with the conditions of life of a being. ,,9 But, to move from here to asserting with La Rochefoucauld that the relative worth of all things is referable back to relative cultures is to commit the Protagorean error on a social, even a world historical level. It does make men, rather than man, the measure of all things, but still ignores the fact that " men" might themselves be the problem. The cultural relativists still remain, after the recognition of these fact s, at a level that refuses to deal with morality itself as a problem. Nietzsche does not inquire into the worth of a particular morality; he knows that it is valued because it maintains a form of life. He does inquire into the worth of a form of life. To come to the " conclusion that no morality is binding, after the truth has dawned ... that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different" is still a " childish folly ." 10 It does not push the critique as far as possible. All such critiques assume the sufficiency of criticism about the often fooli sh opinions that a people may have about its morality. In fact, however, nothing critical has been said of morality as a concept. The cultural relativist, having reduced matters down to a practice, leaves the question there. Good and evil are left uncriticized as categories. Here I broach the most important part of Nietzsche's attack on morality. If philosophical problems were for Nietzsche not so much solved as dissolved, so also the "solution" here would not be to erect a "good" morality, but rather, similar to the recognition that there can be no " pure " language , to escape from those imperatives that any morally structured situation may put upon me n. Nietzsche does not deny that there is in fact something properly ca lled morality. But he says over and above this that as long as men and women behave in a manner that can pro~rly be called moral , or as long as there are moral problems and choices, the results of men 's actions will turn against themselves. In terms as blunt as possible, morality is a manner of behaving which is necessary only because of the sort of being that we are. Like language, it makes the world simpler and less

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fearsome; like language, it will continue to repeat the world to us and ourselves to the world in what Nietzsche sees as an increasingly vicious circle. If morality poses a problem, then, in Nietzsche's understanding, the resolution can only come in a form of life in which it is unnecessary to behave in a manner that is morally structured. (This does not mean behaving immorally; that would still imply morality. It means the concepts don't apply.) Hence, Nietzsche not only moves back to the origins in his critique, but beyond that to a critique of the origins themselves. To do only the former would have been to avoid a critique of the form of life which requires morality ; he is not doing a moral genealogy, but a "genealogy of morals." 11 Tile Critique of tile Utilitarian There is a previous attempt to criticize morality as a concept. In his main treatise on the genealogy of morals, Nietzsche feels obliged to start with a tribU[e to these men, and a criticism of their efforts. What he says about them, the British Utilitarians, is instructive, for it not only reveals Nietzsche 's own understanding, but also closely parallels his criticisms of Kantian epistemology. In both he finds the burgeon of a deep understanding which is kept from flowerin g by the desire to retain a certain form of life. The utilitarians essay - a "very English" attempt - an explanation of the origin of moral values in term s of an elaborate rationalization of a pain-pleasure calculus they believe potentially common to all men. 12 Nietzsche's critique of utilitarianism is complex and varied. He wishes to show what is living in it, what may be salvaged, but also that as a whole it ultimately fails. Firstly, despite the fact that the utilitarian theory is intended to explain the origin of moral sentimen ts, it tends rather to cut the other way and describe ~rtain sentiments that utilitarians would call moral. It must be so: since it sees morality as the result of a pain-pleasure calculus, it relies on what men th ink of the consequences of their actions. Nietzsche here implicitly accepts Kant's argument that the structure of moral action must be universalizable. The problem with utilitarianism is that it is based on the multiplicity of human conclusions as to what is moral (painful-pleasurable) ; it

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must then appear to be simply a complicated version of the Protagorean conclusio ns. For the utilitarians, a hedonistic calculator is the measure of all things moral. This is far too superficial for Nietzsche. In an aphorism in Dawn of Day called " Utilitarian ," he writes, " Perception's in moral matters now run so much in all directions Ikreu z and querl that, for these men, one demonstrates a morality leine Mora/l because of its usefulness, while for those, one refutes it precisely because of that." B I interpret this to be an argument against utilitarianism based on the realization that since the doctrine admits differing conclusions as to moral practice, it in no ways has penetrated below the surface of behavior. It is, of course, obvious that men differ in their moral conclusions, but a position whose logic immediately admits its own refUlarion cannot be right. A note from 1887 continues th is theme ex pl icitly: " What is called 'useful' is completely dependent on the intention, the wherefore ... Thus, utilitarianism is not a basic teaching [Grundlagel but rather one about consequences and absolutely cannot bring any obligation for all." 14 The task is to criticize the category of moral sentiments ; this, however, as Kant had conclusively shown, is by definition potentially universal. Whatever the utilitarians are talking about, they have not yet arrived a[ this category . In the above criticism, Nietzsche states that the intention was the most importam determinant of what is useful. As such his criticism is incomplete, for he knows well that " motives and intentions are seldom sufficiently clear and simple, and sometimes memory itself seems clouded by the consequences of the deed, so that one ascribes deeds to false motives." IS It is apparent that this realization and the consequent attempt to unravel morality are also at the bottom of the critique that Bentham had launched at the moralists of his day. The hedonistic calculus was an attempt to .cut through the vagaries of memory and to ground morality in human behavior and not in rationality or natural law. Indeed, along th ese lines, Nietzsche admits that utilitarianism is a "plausible mode of thought." Certainly he admires and approves the attempt to ground moral sentiments in a clear and this-wordly explanation of psychological bases ; but he does not find the pain-pleasure calculus to be such a clear explanation. Rather, such a calculus seems to him reflective of a desire to do away with suffering and " invent happiness." So, while approving of the attempt, the result at which Benthamites and their more warm-

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blooded descendents arrive seems to him at best petty. As reads an aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: "Well-being as you understand it: that is no goal; it seems to us a finish, a state that will soon make man ridiculous and contemptible . . .. " 16 This pettiness occurs because the utilitarians do not realize that their own expression of preference, their calculus, is only a manifestation of their particular desires. In this case, the desires happen to be those of thoroughly civilized Englishmen . It is not so much the explanation that is faulty ; this is held to be "self-consistent and psychologically tenable within its limits." 17 It is rather a historical elaboration of this calculus which Nietzsche attacks as sociologically, historically , and therefore philosophically unsound . The utilitarians think " by nature unhistorically . ... The key notions . .. [of] 'utility,' 'forgetting ,' 'habit,' and in the end 'error,' all underlie an evaluation of which the higher man has hitherto been proud, as if it were a general prerogative of man as such ." The utilitarians attempt a debunking of Christianity ; it fai ls, though , because it " looks for the genesis of the notion of good in the wrong place . .. ; with those whose good it has proved." 18 The problem now becomes the reason why the utilitarians arrive at such a petty and contemptible conclusion. The answer is not hard . They have failed to realize that they have taken their empirical moral practices and read them back as causes of moral behavior. In epistemology, this was the "error of confusing cause and effect." Here it is also an anti-historical attitude. The Englishmen have taken their moral system, posited it as a universal and timeless fact , and attempted to explain it in a manner that might prove universally applicable. For Nietzsche, their reasoning seems to go like this: "We, Englishmen, behave in a moral manner; this we know. We must explain this behavior in terms that can apply to other moralities as well without denying the fact that either we or they are behaving morally . The principle of utility explains this." But, for Nietzsche, when the task of debunking the origins of Christian values is supposedly accomplished, instead of a new scale to measure moral worth, the utilitarians only come up with conclusions specifically tied to an English notion of proper behavior. Sans genie et sans esprit, these men in the end want " English morality to be recognized as authoritative .... They would like ... to convince themselves that the srriving after English happiness ... is at the same time the rrue

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path of virtue." 19 In doing so they have falsely understood themselves as timeless inhabitants of the kingdom of " real" morality . Nietzsche's most important criticism of the utilitarians, then, is of their critique. They remain, just as did the epistemologists, inexrricably bound to the premise they are trying to get away from ; they make a criticism of moral sentiments, but never of morality in itself. "Utilitarianism," writes Nietzsche. "criticizes the origin of moral valuations, but it believes in them." 20 This final criticism of utilitarianism is not directed at their approach, but at the consequences of their conclusions. Nietzsche feels thac a criticism that leaves the question of moral sentiments on the level of " the good is what makes me feel happy" is characteristic of a time that seeks only to reduce the pain and tension it feels. Nietzsche traces this to the necessity of protecting oneself from the tensions of life in the era of nihilism. Hence, for him, the. mode of decision characteristic of utilitarianism "smells of the populace, who comprehend only the unpleasant consequences of wrongdoing and thus conclude 'it is stupid to do wrong' while they identify the good with the ' useful and pleasant. without furtha ado." 21 The success of the utilitarian must be based on the wisdom of hindsight ; unless the experiences that permit pain-pleasure calculations remain fundamentaUy unchanged in kind and in number, adequate expectations of the resu~ts of a given action will be impossible. Utilitarianism must then restrict the availability of experience and deny the possibility of new experiences.

Explaining the Familiar

The confusion of the English is compounded by their attempt to make the moral sciences over in the image of the narural sciences. In physics, one takes as the object of inquiry the strange and unknown. In the moral sciences, Nietzsche feels that the problem has been shown to be the familiar, that which is so close to our faces that we never see it. The utilitarians assume that the reduction of moral behavior to quanta of pain and pleasure might permit a "scientific calculus." This becomes far too easy a conclusion. Still to be asked, in Nietzsche's relentless imperative, is the question of the significance of what pain and pleasure are for a particular form of life. That this latter was, or could be a problem , simply did not occur to them;

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aftc=r all, do not all mc=n know what pain and pkasurc= arc=? For Nic=tzsche, as later for Frc=ud, thc= answc=r is no. Having made (hc= initial false assumption that onc= knew what morality consisted of (in this case, what pkasure and pain wc=rc=), previous moral sciences never became scientific. They remained moral, tic=d to the original assumptions that thc=y were supposed to ~ questioning. They did, however,give man a feeling of understanding, in fact of conrrolling circumstances that had previously seemed mysterious. "Since at bottom it is merely a matter of whishing to be rid of oppressive representations," writes Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols . "one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them; the first rc=presentation that c=xplains thc= unknown as familiar fc=e1s so good that one takes it for true." 22 In this understanding, previous moral sciences, in fact morality itself, remain attempts at regulating the world. They depend on the presupposition of an absolute yardstick against which one could measure and judge activity . For Nietzsche, these assumptions, which are necessary for there to be morality at all, lead inevitably to sc=lf-contradiction. On the one hand, moral activity requires the assumption of the existence of some standards independent of and external to the individual. Without this, there is only laissez-aller. Furthc=rmorc=, for moral action to be possible, there must also ~ free individuals who can choose to partake (or not) of such standards. If one did the right naturally, it would be hard to speak of morality; whatever instincts are, they are certainly not spoken of as moral. Moral choice is only possible if the ego is not a priori identified with thc= moral realm, but must in fact choose to be part of it. Thus the acquisition of moral significance must at leaS( originally take place in opposition to what the ego is. The ego which makes such choices must, however, be valued in and of itself; its significance must be acquired in opposition to that which is a priori " not-ego, " which here must ~ the sphc=re of moral standards. Thus the contradiction : the ego must be independent to make moral choices, but the only choices that it can makc= to ~ moral are ones that deny its independence. For Nietzsche, any moral choice thereby leads to the destruction of that which makes it possible. Any given morality is characterized by the particular form this contradiction takes in it; in all cases, the moral system must stamp

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out the drives toward individuality, even though it could not exist without them. To this effect, "a whole sphere of fantastic hypomescs" were created with the specific mission of slandering egotistic instincts. Human self-assertion must itself be branded as evil so that man will fail to hope that he might by his own will attain satisfaction. " In short," writes Nietzsche in a late note, "once man had brought his instincts into contradiction with a purely imaginary world , he ended by despising himself as incapable of performing actions that were good." 23 Morality becomes effectively a ~ of what Hegel, in another context, refers to as " bad infinity "; it contradicts itself and yet is at the same time incapable of resolution. To maintain the delicate balance between the obligation to eliminate pure individuality, and the concomitant prerequisite of individuality, a number of devices have slowly developed over the centuries. The most effective device is that men become "calculable, regular, necessary." Since moral obligation consists in the acceptance of certain rules for action , it will obviously be the more vigorous the less danger there is that quirks of unpredictable individual action might suddenly take hold. If through processes not yet examined, men are made more calculable, less moral cement is required for the community and there is less danger of disintegration . By making men predictable , writes Nietzsche in Tbe Wanderer and His Shadow , a means is discovered "of preserving the community and beating back its tendency to fall apan."H The more men are made calculable. however, the more calculable they are. Gradually the very stuff of their nature alters, until they art effectively "regular and necessary" beings. They come to perceive themselves in this fashion. As this occurs, it becomes increasingly difficult on the level of moral action and imperatives for an individual to conceive of undertaking an action from reasons not those of his particular moral community. As before, morality is necessary for survival; this means at least that it gives the men under its sway reasons for doing something. If, as Nietzsche holds to be: the case, there appear no reasons for action outside a moral community, then men are held to morality not only by belief and habit, but also by a fear that, were they not, they might find themselves devoid of reasons for doing anything. Hence, one of the cornerstones of morality is fear - the fear that without morality, life will be void of

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meaning such that we have no choice but simply to give up. As Stanley Cavell once remarked in a slightly different context, "The answer to the question 'Why should I be more moral?' may well be that you are too cowardly for much of anything else."25 Morality will not let men go. No matter how empty of meaning life is or how great the atomization and loneliness of the world , the fear that there be nothing at all continues to provide enough moral fabric for the community to remain together. Such fear has an aUy. The moral perspective consists of asking "how much or how little is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality in an opinion, in a state or affect, in a will , a tal· ent. . .. " 26 If men are constrained by fear , they are also lured by the ever present hope of attaining that which the moral world promises. The hope of redemption is the other great servant of morality. In his discussion of the story of Pandora and Epimetheus (the half-witted brother of Prometheus) who let all evils except hope OUt of the box and into the world, Nietzsche writes: " Zeus did not wish for man to throwaway his life ... even though he suffered so much from other evils; rather he should go on letting himself be tormented again and again. Thus, he gives man hope : this is, in truth , the worst of the evils, for it prolongs the torments of man ." 27 Given this vision of morality . release from it may appear as potential liberation of humankind. It is not surprising that Nietzsche does not propose a "new" morality but rather would wish to annihilate morality, since he understands it as a world picture from which we cannot escape. Even when morality has developed into nihilism, it persists as minimalist ; and though the enterprise itself is called into question (much, for instance, as some modern art calls art itself into question), it continues to be moral behavior. The structures of hope and fear which Nietzsche sees as supporting moral action must be broken; without this destruction there is no escape from an increasingly formally framed dialectic. In a line left OUt of most editions of the Nachlass, Nietzsche notes that such deS[rucrion is "properly the task of a Tractatus politicUS ." 28 As it is, were men to remember the turbulent origins of their moral sentiments, they would never have done with them, and moral life would not be possible. Thus a " politics of virtue," operating by means of a " faculty of o blivion, " has effectively forced men to forget where they came from . This faculty, so anticipatory of

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Freud's doctrine of repression, operates in a manner reverse to genealogy. It sets up the barriers that keep man's genesis from him. "Man. as in his intellectUal habit, has forgotten the original purpose of his so-called right and just affairs. ... How little moral would the world look without forgetfulness of human dignity." 29 The task of the genealogist requires a political treatise, since morality has been erected. enforced. and required of humanity . If its origin and defense are human. and not "natural," then the attack will come from a human footing. and the clash will be between two competing deities. The Politics of Morality

A community under challenge fights back to preserve the boundaries that are its morality and definition. Origins must be kept unquestionable; if morality were seen naked and ashamed, the resulting trauma would be insupportable. The required conttol comes mainly through guilt. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals . Nietzsche seeks ra locate the origin of this feeling in the contractual relationship of creditor and debtor. (Scbuld means guilt in German; die Schulden are debts). This peculiar, though apparently accurate etymological analysis implies for Nietzsche that guilt is a particular pattern of relations between an individual and his society. One is scbuldig - guilty - if in debt to the society; one feels a need of repayment. Guilt becomes thus a manner of measuring oneself in terms of relation with the community. The society stands " to its members in that same vital basic relation: that of the credirar to his debtor." 30 A man feels guilt toward his community. he feels bound ra it in a manner that no act of his alone can affect ; it must be an act that society recognizes. If he " pays his debt to society " - the language is still current - he can then be brought back and readmitted . Without such payment, he stands outside and condemned. Guilt is then a measuring of ones actions by an external standard - a measurement that leaves one wanting. Nietzsche finds that morality has developed such that the debts progressively incurred are less and less repayable. Men are put in an impossible position; the very fact of being a member of society or a human being is made of humanly irredeemable crime. The greatest development of this dialectic. which Freud calls "civilization and its discontents." is reached

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in relation to the divinity and the Christian God in particular. He is so powerful, and humans so sinfu lly in his debt, tha[ repayment is inconceivable. Under such conditions, when the creditor is owed so much , the permanent condition of man becomes guilty indebtedness to an abstract entity. J1 Against Nietzsche , it might be thought that with the decline of faith in God, the sense of guilt would decline. Far from it : "The time comes when we will have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years; we are losing the center of gravity that let us live .... We are now plunging into the opposite values with the same amount of energy with which we were Chr istians (mit dem wir Christen gewesen sind) . . . . " 32 That God is dead does not lighten the burden; in fact, since " we killed him ," our guilt is thereby increased. Now men live on in the shadows of the dead God, and his death is merely a warning and portent of what is to come. To "live on in the shadows of the dead God" is to continue to partake of the for m and outline of a particular mode of action, here Christian morality, while lacking the subS{ance. Nietzsche understands as well as did "'lax Weber some years later that two thousand years of conti nuing moral practice have changed more than just religious beliefs. Those practices have become enmeshed in a grid that pickets men 's lives. Hen ce, important sustai ning mechanisms, such as gu ilt, will continue to operate even among those who consider themselves somehow free of religion. To be part of a genealogy is to have an unescapable fate. In fact, there is another 'significant sense in which the death of God makes situation somewhat worse for men. For those who were believers, the operation of guilt had a certain meaning; it reminded them of their humanity, their duties , and the source of their inspiration. For those who live without God, yet continue to act in the forms of J udeo-Christian morality, the forces of guilt that may drive them on now lack all goals, even the imagined ones. In the past "God so loved t he world " that He might always take bac k part of the guilt

upon Himse lf. Nietzsche writes in 011 the Genealogy of Morals : " The creditor (Glo'ubigerj sacrifices himself for his debtor, OUt of love (can one give credi t to that?), out of love for his debwr. " 13 With the death of God, such Christian morality becomes impossible , and even this marvellous sacrifice loses its redemptive claims. As I shall argue in the next chapter, Christ may have embodied for Nietzsche the highest feasible morality. but now this morality is becoming only

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trUly possible in the wooded isolation of the hermit whom Zarathustra encounters at the beginning of his journey. In order to understand where Nietzsche sees the proper focus of the problem of morality it is useful to investigate the direction taken by some of his occasional comments on more immediate social matters. The continuing operation of guilt, for instance. impl ies responsibility. A person feels guilty for his situation. He reasons that he must at some point be at the origin of his present distressing situation. He must conclude that it is somehow his fault, since to do otherwise would be to question the legitimacy of the moral bonds of the co mmunity. So. while remaining fully attached to the principles of the community of which he is and remains a member, he must conclude that he cou ld and should have done other than he did. J4 We are back to the error of free will; language and morality have naturally conspired with each other. Furthermore. by placing the supposed locus of blame on an act that the individual must have chose n to undertake, men will tend to see self-consciousiness as a prereq uisite for escaping the self-punishment of guilt. Socrates himself seems to conclude that no man will do evil knowingly. Presu mably . the knowledge required to generate self-consciousness should make it increasingly possible to avoid "evil " (guilt-producing) acts; without consciousness there seems to be no manner in which to escape the flux of mere events. This makes it possible to distinguish between acts committed consciously and somehow su bject to moral standard s, and those " committed " un co nsciously, for which we may want to refuse responsibility. Thus we distinguish premeditated. unpremeditated murder, and manslaughter, or even irrestistable impulse, all in terms of greater or lesser degrees of co nsciousness. This conclusion, which to us se cms so natural, raises problems for Nietzsche. Along the same lines, we might. for instan ce, be tempted to co nclude that we are in no way respo nsible for the " moral content of our dreams." Yet Nietzsche writes in Morgenrote , "nothing is more you rs than your dreams." And fifty years later in a piece on " Moral Responsibility for the Content of Dreams ," Freud queries arcanely. " who else would be respo nsible?" 3S The implication that one can distingu ish sharply in mo ral terms between the unconscious and the conscio us is problematic. In any case, the psy che is a full part of life, and as much or as little

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responsibility must be taken for it as for that which is conscious. If Nietzsche attacks the transcendental in Kant, so also must he attack the notion of an unconscious world which would remain in principle inaccessible and known only through representation. Nietzsche is not saying that the unconscious and the conscious are one. He is attacking the notion of the unconscious, which later becomes dominant in the thought of Freud, as a shapeless locus of that which is never apprehended directly and is known only through posterior signs. In the genealogical understanding, conscious and unconscious are necessarily linked, and known in the same way; they are part of the same family. A moral scandard applied to one will apply to the other. And the unity which they are - " life," in Nietzsche's terms - will stand outside such valuations. Nietzsche's conclusion is not , as was Freud 's, that we are responsible for our dreams ; instead , as he writes in Morgenrote , " Oedipus was right, we are not responsible for our dreams, nor for our awake life; .. . no one is responsible for his acts, no one for his Iife." )6 This is a "conclusion as clear as sunlight," that man cannot be judged by his creations, though he may be found wanting in them. Nietzsche's focus is not on individual responsibility. at least not directly. The image of the heroic overman which is usually associated with popular understandings of Nietzsche is dangerously misleading. Implicit in the above analysis is that there is nothing in the psyche of man which . once released from a romantic Pandora 's box, will triumph over the pettiness of this world . The standard notion of the Ubermensch seems to imply that there is in at least some men a potential untapped reservoir of energy which needs only release. But if there is the sort of union of the conscious and unconscious to which Nietzsche holds, this is simply impossible. We must then look elsewhere for the source of the problem. I pointed out above that the prevalent notion of moral action legitimates a conceptual separation of the actor from the act. It is necessary for this view ro hold that the acror could have acted otherwise. I also argued that Nietzsche thought the conceptual separation to be already a piece of moraljzing. These considerations are made specifically clear in Nietzsche's comments on criminality and punishment. In The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche draws up an unsystematic list of the different uses of the word punishment. It is designed ro be

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unsystematic and resembles nothing so much as the different lists that Wittgenstein also draws up when he wants to point to the various families a word may belong to . By such an approach Nietzsche is again called attention to the fact that there can be no one definition of the word punishment shared by all its meanings. Words are rather "pockets into which now this, now that , now some more can be put." 37 It might be logical, for instance, to presuppose that punishment is "supposed to possess the value of awakening the fee ling of guilt in the guilty person. " 38 Yet such a notion implies of necessity that the criminal had a free choice to go against the society ; that the society is supposed to awaken the sense of indebtedness in him - he would so to speak have broken a contract ; and that now he has no choice but to expiate his crime. Juridical punishment would then be that which " restores both private honor and the honor of society." 39 That there might be something about a society leading an individual to act as he did and so shaping him that he had '10 other cboice but to act in su ch a manner, and thus could no t be in the normal sense considered respon sible , could simply never be a question under such a perspective. In the moral view, acts are presumed not to have a part, at least no t fo r the purpose of moral judgment. In the character "The Pale Cri minal" in Zaratbustra , Nietzsche argues that the criminal and the insane should be considered as basically the same type. They should be understood in terms of the society by which they are judged criminal or insane. "Those who become sic k today are overcome by that evil that is evil today: they want to hurt with that which hurts them. But there have been other ages and another good and evil. " Nietzsche is advancing here a view of punishment which would seem to be related to the later writings of both Freud and such existential psychiatrists as Karl Menninger, Thomas Szasz, and R. D. Laing. With Freud , he holds it possible that a crime be comm itted in order to expiate a supposed prior guilt. -40 Nietzsche calls this " madness before the deed ": relatio ns to social configurations become such th at, in order to alleviate the unexplained guilt one has, one is forced to engage in acts that the society will punish. The society punishes and induces guilt, requires expiation, forces a crime so that expiation is possible, and holds the individual responsible for the whole process. In terms of the so.ciety in question, there should then be no logical

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difference between "crimi nals and the insane ... if we suppose that the current pattern of moral thought is the pattern of spiritual health." 41 Nietzsche is not saying here that society is healthy and that the immoral and the insane deserve to be neated alike. He is saying that, in terms of the logic of the moral structure , both fall outside the society for the same reasons. They are therefore essentially part of the same category - those who have been driven to their respective deeds by the society itself. To this effect, he goes on in the passage cited above to point to the possibilities of reforming social practices to remove the supposed necessity of revenge in dealing with antisocial behavior. Were all criminals to be treated as insane, he argues, at least society would escape from the notion that such men were somehow in such a morally autonomous and ahistorical position that men might be held responsible for their actions in society's terms. Nietzsche is quite aware that there are no institutions for this sort of treatment; nevertheless he wonders at " how relieved would be the general sentiment of life, if one could rid oneself of the belief in guilt along with the old instinct of revenge and consider it the refined wish of the happy, along with Christianity, to speak well of one's enemies and to do well to those who have offended us." 42 There is little doubt that these proposals of Nietzsche for institutional reform are meant as devices to demonstrate how different the moral practices of a society are from their self-conscious moral justifications. Nietzsche is driving at something far more radical than simply psychiatric reformism ; he is pointing out that while it might be conceptually possible within the moral logi c of a society for guilt to be abolished. this will never happen, for it would endanger the society.43 Situations and societies employ what have to be termed psycho-political strong-arm tactics to make it impossible for the individual to escape naturally some of the contradictions in which they are placed. Thus, and this is the most important part of Nietzsche's considerations of morality. the real question that must be posed is not about the relative health of the individual vis-a-vis the society. At his most profound level, Nietzsche is not concerned to fmd a way to liberate some supposed masterly moral "blond beast" from the prison of social morality. His investigations into the logic of moral structures do not raise for him the question of how to get healthy indiuiduals. but rather drive him to "see k out what no thinker has yet had the

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da!"ing to measure - the health of a society." .... Questions of the origins of good and evil should not focus on individuals and individual practices, but rather on the society at hand. And, if individuals start ~having immorally , the cause must be looked for in the society, not in the aberrations of particular individuals. Nietzsche is saying that an unhealthy society will in the end leave the individuals comprising it with no place to turn . This is why Nietzsche 's moral investigation is bound in the long run to become a political-ideological investigation: an unhealthy society (which has yet to be examined in detail) will produce individuals who can only be kept in line by the mechanisms mat have !xen described in this chapter. This Nietzschean point is the deep significance, for instance, of the title of R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience ; moral experience, especially in this day and age, is ultimately defensible only through means that have to be described as political, for the dominant standards of the society are enforced on individuals. Nietzsche sees morality in much the same way that he sees epistemology. There is a gradual emptying out of that which is living in morality. In the metaphor Nietzsche uses in The Birth of Tragedy , men are left "running up and down the banks" of moral forms , guilty, and without sensuous relation between morality and life. To the degree that they are unable to leave these banks, morality is in fact hostile to life, for contrary to Marx , Nietzsche foresees no automatic dialectical process of escape. Nihilism as a stage of morality is " necessary because our present values have in themselves this logical consequence: because nihilism is the logical conclusion of our great values and ideals - because we must first experience nihilism in order to comprehend what the value of these 'values' was - sometime or another we are in need of new values." 45 Th is says in effect that the necessary preconditions for our morality are disappearing. It is increasingly impossible to be meaningfully moral, at least in the manner to which we have been accustomed . Much as truth is becoming impossible and the attempt to maintain it hostile to life , so also with morality. Morality has become an idol, a statue; to be killed by it will most assuredly not be a tragic death. The nihilistic imperative results from the necessity that morality regularize behavior and establish a system of rewards and punishments both psychic and physical. It enforces the ideology or mythology that keeps people attached to a certain form of life. In doing so,

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it must set itself up as absolute and unquestioned: it is a metaphor that has escaped its creators. In the central chapter of The Brothers Karamazov , Dostoyevsky establishes a similar view. Ivan Karamazov relates to his brothers the parable of the "G rand Inq uisitor. " Christ has returned to earth , is recognized ; people begin to follow him. He is then arrested and taken before the Grand Inquisitor who says to Christ: " Be silent . .. . Thou hast no righ t to add anything to what thou hadst said of old. Why, then, art thou come to hinder us? .. Tomorrow I shall condemn thee, and burn thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have today kissed thy feet, tomorrow . .. shall rush to heap up the embers of thy fi re .... Thou didst proudly and well, like God. But the weak, unruly race of men, are they like God? " The Inquisi tor contin ues: " I have joined the ranks of those who have corrected ch y work .... I shall burn thee .... For if ever anyone deserved our fires, it is thou.,, -4(j To all of this speech Ch rist stands in mute silence, attempts no reply, nor, Dosroyevsky ind icates, has he onc. At the end he is led away to his death . The point is clear: orga nized morality is and will be different from that intended by its founde r - and there is nothing that can be done about it. For Dostoyevsky, there is n'o thing: Ch rist does not reply to the Inquisitot, but remains silent, unable to challenge the historicist truth presented to him. 47 Nietzsche' however cannot stop with such pious acquiescence. History may be seen as the process by whieh the praxis and valuations of great men are made viable. Over and above Dostoyevsky 's eroti c silence, Nietzsche asks that we distinguish origin and purpose. Dostoyevsky had seen the historical reification of moral practice as an inevitable consequence of all form s of moral teaching. Nietzsche seeks however to also investigate this supposed necessity ; it is inevitable? If so, why? Is it conceivable that a moral teaching might leave behind something other than its own idol? To these questions I must now tum , in an investigation of the immoralist, the "great man" who is responsible for setting moral practices in motion .

Chapter V WHO IS DIONYSIAN? THE PROBLEM OF THE IMMORALIST It ;s modrst of t~e nightingtllt not to require anyone to listen to it; b", it -is {liso proud of tbe nigbtingale not t o carl! whether anyone listens to it or not.

- Slncn Kierkegaard. 0" tbe Difference between a Genius and an Apostle

In two months I sball be tbe foremost name in Europe. - Nietzsche [0 Overbeck, Christmas, 1888

In the Preface to The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche reminds his reader that, prior to the present form of morality, there existed an "older and more primitive species of morality" which he calls the " morality of mores." This pattern was characterized by the non~tlective adherence to the customs or ethos of a particular society. Manifestly. this stage has come to an end and has bec=n replaced by the present moral system , in which intentions

of actors and self-consciousness assume a far greater importance. Nietzsche sees, however, the prc=sent moral system also as a stage, itself drawing to a dose. This is not merely historical happenstance. He understands the structure of the contemporary moral system to [ 108

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contain a fatal dialectic: it must finish by destroying itself. As such the position is no different from that of Karl Marx , who saw bourgeois civilization creating the conditions of its own destruction. Contrary [0 Marx , Nietzsche saw no logic inherent in th e pro~ss of self-destruction which guaranteed the change from the period of the "morality of mores" to the present stage, and no logic that might ensure that the end of th is stage correspond with the beginn ing of a new one. For Marx, the world of proletarian socialism was the death of the bourgeois world that had spawned it: for Nietzsche, there is no reason (Q assume that the end of Christian morality might be anything but frustration. To understand why this is so, it is useful to look at the historical sh ift from the stage of the ' morality of mores to the " moral " stage. Nietzsche places this in a period rough ly between the fifth ~ ntury B.C. and the third century A.D., and further specifies the worldhistorical characters of Socrates and Christ as responsible for the direction that moral developments took. The modern world is the legatee of their calling. No doubt , toO, he sees himself in the same world-historical position, and wishes to transfigure the world with another new and terri fying transvaluation of all values. Christ and Socrates are, however, more than just the names attached to a stage in world history. This had been their importance for Hegel; for Nietzsche they are important also as men . It is certainly sign ificant to examine the historical changes that occur as the result of these men, but it is even more so to investigate their particular characteristics as human beings. For Nietzsche any investigation of their accomplishments will also be an investigation of th eir personalities. I shall leave the history to a future chapter and concentrate here on the men. If it can be shown that in certain important aspects their perso nal ity is fl awed , Nietzsche wants to point out those flaws that he finds responsible for the development of the moral practices thcy formulated. It is certainly true, and Nietzsche will insist on th is !lgain and again, that Socrates and ChriS( broke with their times. They did not simply formulate necessary developments of world history ; they were considered criminals in the eyes of their society . Whereas Hegel might say that their "criminaliry " is simply appearance, due to their progressive nature, Nietzsche wants to say that they did in fact make a break in their times. Unfonunately, for different reasons, they

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make what he sees as the wrong break: their immoralism itself is flawed . It is not enough just to be a lawbreaker.

The Problem of tbe Imm oralist

A person is immoral only in relation to some system recognized as moral. If a man pushes questions so far as to break through the moral horizons of a culture, so as to la nd outside the arena of accepted practice, he becomes, by definition, a criminal and outcast. Conversely, the society must seek to preserve its moral foundations , and thus develops processes, some of which were examined in the previous chapter, to keep or bring people back in line. Nonetheless, moral perspectives must have a beginning ; they are often associated with the name of a founder and with a break in previously accepted moral practices. Moral revolution, the "transvaluation of all values" of which Nietzsche speaks, must need break the boundaries of the society that nunures it. To be a moral revolutionary, one must, by one 's creation, be a destroyer. Nietzsche considers those who have accomplished su ch revaluations the key figures in the genealogy of moral ity. They are the fath ers; their seed gives an initial and never abandoned direction to subsequent developme nts. There is little doubt that this perspective has some historical accuracy. Nietzsche accepts as true the accusation of the Athenian Assembly that Socrates was a corrupter of youth and a destroyer of faith in the gods. On the surface such an accusation might seem strange. The fourth century was a period of turmoil and ske pticism and it wou ld appear that few educated Athenians retained a Homeric attitude toward Olympus. This is not to say, however, that they disbelieved in the gods. The accusation against Socrates shows the significan ce that the Assembly found in the gods; it was still politically necessary to keep the realm of the gods unquestionable. The six centuries sin ce Homer had no doubt removed this realm from the unquestio ned and obviously true, bu r it was sti ll possible - or so the Assembly thought - to defend them politically by eliminating those forces th at threatened the moral basis of the state. Christ also, Nietzsche argues, must be understood as presenting a political threat to the moral structure of Jewish society. Though Nietzsche often links many of Jesus' teachings with Judaism , there

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can be no doubt that he saw a tremendous opposition between the Jewish state and what Christ did and said. Nietzsche writes: " This holy anarchist, who called the lower classes, the sufferers and 'sinners' into opposition against the 'ruling order' with a language that today would have gotten him sent to Siberia - this man was a political criminal, insofar as political cri mes were still possible under those conditions. This brought him to che cross .. . . " 1 Small wonder then ch at Nietzsche should have fought so fiercely ~ I am tempted [ 0 say valiantly - with both Socrates and Christ. They broke the moral bonds of their ti mes and effectively forced a reorientation of futu re history in their own and perhaps idolatrous images. Nietzsche is fa scinated with their achievement and , without doubt, wishes fo r si milar success fo r himself. In a letter to his sister, never sent perhaps because he did not want [0 make definite the break between them , he writes: "For what I have to do is terrible , in any sense of the word. I do not chaUenge individuals - I am challenging humanity as a whole with my terrible accusation; ... there attaches to my name a quantity of doom that is beyond tell·mg . .. .,,2 If Nietzsche is to accomplish his projected revaluation of all values for this coming age, it will be necessary to overcome the legacies of both Christ and Socrates. He has to fight with these men; the battle must be joined. For Nietzsche, the time is only now becoming right such t hat transfiguration is once again possible; for the first time in centuries, im morality on a world-historical scale is potentially meaningful. He writes, for instance, in the late eighteen seven ties, chat "the strength of cuStom is remarkably weakened and the senti ment of morality so refined and so elevated that we can almost describe it as volatilized. ,,) At the end of his life, he finds in h is " unmasking of Christian morality ... a uni que event, a real catastrophe, a fatality it breaks the history of humanity in two.'>4 Nietzsche finds the contemporary crisis greater than those crises that confronted t he world at the end of the Golden Age in Greece and the end of the Hellenic period. His task, if accompl ished, will be even mo re important than Christ's or Socrates '. The courage required for this moral warfare is great. Ch rist already had said th at one must reject fa mily, kin, and country to stand fir mly outside the co mmunity. Here , perhaps, is o ne of the reasons that Nietzsche inveighs so strongly against the "moral tarantulism "

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of Rousseau.s Rousseau, in fact, shares an outtage against the moral developments of his day; he understands also that morality is coterminous with a community and that moral principles do not transcend the group. But he did believe it possible to develop a form of life in which men might be both fully conscious and also moral. For Nietzsche, the fully conscious individual is necessarily an unmasking and questioning voice. He will inevitably come into conflict with the group. Men like Socrates "all take a new route and suffer the highest disapproval from all the representatives of the morality of custom - they take themselves out of the community as immoralists, and are, in the deepest sense of the word, evil. ,>6 Nietzsche's occasional praise of the "criminal rype " stems from this; such men must be rejected by society. Among occasional criminals he includes "scientists, artists, the genius, the free spirit ... " and concludes that "all innovators of the spirit must for a time bear the pallid and fatal mark of the Chandala [the criminal outcast] on their foreheads , not because they are so considered, but because they themselves feel the terrible cleavage that separates them from everything that is cus· tomary or reputable. ,,1 Christ and Socrates provide Nietzsche with the two most important cases of immoralists in action. He thinks they both make mistakes in their lawbreaking and thus stand at the head of the dissolution now besetting the world. Since his concern is to trace their genealogical relation to present developments, Nietzsche must not deal only with the substance of their revolution . Moral practices have certainly changed since the ones advocated by Christ. Nietzsche is rather concerned with how the previous immoralists speak; it is the structure of their message which will have persisted to the contemporary world; it is the mode of the morality Nietzsche is after. He must discover specific qualities about Christ and Soctates as men which made them err. As elsewhere, it is in unspoken and unquestioned necessities that clues to genealogical developments are found.

Socrates; The Problem of the Virtu oso It is indicative of how far we are from Nietzsche that his views on Socrates should have caused so much controversy. i\\any of those who happily have given up the title "believer" and have no difficulty

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proclaiming their agnosticism - though perhaps atheism involves too much commitment - seem to find it difficult to accept the possibility that Nietzsche might have "been against" Socrates. If Socrates is the cornerstone of Western humanism, it would no doubt appear wrong, certainly rash, to reject Man, as well as God and Christianity. Nothing would be left . Thus, many commentators have invested much time in attempts to " rescue" Nietzsche from his own attack, in order to show that he " realiy" did not mean andlor say all of those highly critical passages. I shall consider one of the most important of these below. On the other hand, many other commentators8 have taken the perfectly natural posicion that since Nietzsche says he does not like Socrates, this means he in fact does not. More dangerously, they have also assumed that it was perfectly clear what " not liking Socrates" means. Nietzsche, for instance, notes at one point that "Socrates stands so close to [him) that (he1 almost always fights with him ." 9 For some people, Nietzsche is here ad mitting, perhaps almost in bad faith, that he is is really one with Socrates. Certainly Walter Kaufmann seizes this aphorism as the centerpiece of his defense of a pro-Socratic Nietzsche. Yet, in my reading, the meaning is not at all obvious. It might mean, for instance, that Nietzsche was afraid of not being original (a comment Freud once made about his own relation to Nietzsche) ; or, that his doctrine appears the same as that of Socrates, but, in fact, is not ; or, that the two men have the same doctrine, but for different reasons, and that the reasons are important ; or, that unless Nietzsche is thought of as different from Socrates, he will have no effect, or not the effect he desires. One could probably come up with a few more possibili ties. The problem is that neither the notion of a pro-Socratic Nietzsche, nor that of an anti-Socratic Nietzsche tells us anything about Nietzsche. These opinions only manifest and confirm the writer's and reader's intentions. Be all this as it may, and subject to further investigations. The relation is certain ly not clear. By Nietzsche's adm ission , Socrates created many of the standards on which life would reS{ for the next twenty-three hundred years. 10 He struggled aga inst the decadence he saw in his own times ; whether he was successful or not, his effect was enormous. J aspers claims that Nietzsche was envious of Christ, which may be the case. He surely was envious of the accomplishments of Socrates.

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In his major work on Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann devotes a lengthy chapter to the demonstration of his contention that Nietzsche was really an admirer of Socrates. His antagonists are men like Richard Oehler, who had devoted a lengthy book to the contention that Nietzsche didn't like Socrates. Since many of the men who wrote as Oehler did had at best ambiguous relations with the Nazis, one suspects that what motivated them was the desire to find in Nietzsche an intellectual ancestor for the new Germany who was a break with the Judeo-Christian humanist heritage. Kaufmann, then, is try ing to effectuate the reverse operation, to bring Nietzsche back into the fold of the tradition of Western thought. No doubt Oehler's one-sided views are misguided , perhaps even obviously wrong. It is worthwhile, however, to devote some time here to a consideration of Walter Kaufmann 's view. His is the major understanding in English and the direction that he takes seems to me characteristic of a whole generation of Nietzschean scholarship. Summarily, it consists of attempting to see Nietzsche as another mountain peak in the range of Western thought. Socrates, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche: at the risk of exaggeration, it seems to me that Kaufmann is determined to find a manner to resolve his sympathy for Socrates, for Nietzsche , and presumably for his own opinions. While the presumption that these men m ust all have something in common might be criticized with the same methodological objections that Nietzsche made to Kant , the nature of Kaufmann 's contention strikes me as important enough to warrant substantive investigation. It is difficult to figure out exactly what Kaufmann 's conclusions about Nietzsche and Socrates are , once one gets past the perfectly correct notion that Nietzsche does not simplistically reject Socrates. Kaufmann argues that Nietzsche distinguishes between " (1) the men he admires ; (2) the ideas for which they stand ; (3) their followers." II It is not clear that these distinctions are Nietzschean in spirit. In any case, Kaufman n holds that Nietzsche not only likes Socrates the man , but also Socrates the teacher. For Kaufmann , then, the first two points constitute a SO rt of ambiguous monumental history; Socrates' life and words stand as potential instruction to the contemporary world . The problem with this appreciation is its neglect of the genealogy of the matter. It is probably a priori wrong to try to compare what

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Nietzsche said with what Plato-Socrates said in the dialogue. A genealogical appreciation of Socrates must take into account Socrates' relation to our time ; he cannot be seen as simply another lofty peak. Hena=, Kaufmann's occasional comparison of what Nietzsche says (or seems to say) with what Socrates said (or seemed to say) implies that the historical Socrates can somehow be lifted bodily into dialogue with Nietzsche. But Nietzsche cannot separate Socrates the man from what Socrates became, since the genealogical kernel is the same in each. 12 The genealogical understanding is not the historical. The culmination of Kaufmann's argument revolves around an apparent identification of the manifestation of Dionysos described in the commentary on Beyond Good and Evil in Ecce Homo with the Dionysos mentioned in the next to the last passage of Beyond with, finally, a referenC(' to Socrates in The Gay Science as the pied piper (Rattenfa'nger) of Athens, In the passage from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche proclaims himself as the " last follower and initiate" of a Versucher-Gott (god of experiences and temptation), called Dionysos, who revealed to him much that is "secret, new, strange, wonderful, and uncanny." It is to this god that his "first fruits" were offered. U Kaufmann claims that this god is in fact Socrates and notes that "since Nietzsche fell pitifully short of Socrates' serenely mature humanity ... his very admiration invites comparison with the mad drunken Alcibiades .. , who could not resist the fascination and charm of Socrates." 14 Kaufmann's conclusion poses two problems, that of textual evidence, and that of the meaning of being a disciple of Dionysos, who apparently appears in any number of manifestations, On the first question, the textual evidence appears contrary to Kaufmann 's conclusion . His main piece of evidence is the implied identity between the "pied piper" of The Gay Science and the god who "caught" Nietzsche in the passage from Beyond Good and Evil. The problem with Kaufmann's view is that in the 1686 Preface to Tbe Birtb of Tragedy, the Rattenfa'llger is identified as Wagner, a man with " dragon killer 's bravado and a rat catcher's tricks." The dragon reappears in the first chapter of Zaratbustra as the embodiment of both Hegel and Wagner and represents an intermediate stage between Christian morality and the destructive aspects of Zarathustra. IS Wagner is a likely candidate. Nietzsche had first expected and then hoped that Wagner might become the new Aeschylus who would

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Dionysian to G~rman culture. Ni~tzsch~ also fmds himself praise this Dionysos. This might b~ tru~ for Wagn~r . Certainly Ni~tzsch~ would hav~ had by 1886 (Wagn~r had di~d 5Om~ two and a half y~ars befor~) some scruples in attributing to bim "fine cer~monious titles of luster and merit. More t~lling yet is th~ reference to the offering of the " first fruics": The Birth of Tragedy was dedicated to Wagner. Any attempts to link Nietzsche's first public work to Socrates seems a misguided endeavor. Finally, at the end of the passage in Beyond Good and Em, Nietzsche reports a conversation he has had wich this manifestation of DionY50s. The Nietzsche who is talking appears to be young, for he is still surprised by the desirability of evil. During the course of the conversation, Dionysos turns to Ariadne, whom he loves. Nietzsche was to identify Wagner's wife as Ariadne to the point of sending her a postcard shortly after the onset of his insanity, " Ariadne - I love you ." 16 (That the postcard is signed Dionysos complicates Nietzsche's subsequent identification of himself, but not his identification in 1886 of this particular manifestation of Dionysos.) It is important to be clear here about just what has been established . It does not appear that the manifestation of Dionysos to whom Nietzsche refers can be Socrates; it appears that it must be Wagner. This establishes little about Wagner, still less about Socrates. About Wagner we can only deduce that Nietzsche thought he saw something there which seduced him to his later career. It is not clear exactly what that was. About Socrates we can only find {hat the rejection of the Socrates-Dionysos correlation points strongly in the direction that Socrates is not Dionysian , a conclusion that Nietzsche had first seemed to advance in The Birth of Tragedy . The question becomes one of what the reasons are for Kaufmann's contention. Kaufmann is misled, I think because h ~ neglects the genealogical understanding of the Greek. As noted, he tends to see Socrates in a line of philosophers and wise men which runs from Socrates to Shakespeare, and then on to Goethe , Hegel, and Nietzsche. (This mythography can be explored at l~ngth by consulting Kaufmann 's From Sbakespeare to Ex istemiaiism .) Mu ch as Nietzsche advances opinions that Kaufmann finds somewhat violent and eccentric versions of his own, so then must Socrares become a serene and controlled version of Nietzsche. return

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Kaufmann ignores Nietzsche's unwillingness to separate a man from what he does. His understanding of the relation between Nietzsche and Socrates presumes that the separation of actor from his actions and the consequences of his actions is possible. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, as I have tried to demonstrate, we are all, so to speak, potentially world historical; we already incarnate our dreams and our descendants. Kaufmann 's judgment is a·hiswrical ; it removes Socrates from what became of his acts. For Nietzsche, contrary to Doswyevsky or Kaufmann , the Grand Inquisitor and Christ are ultimately of the same family. as are Socrates. and say. Kant. Socrates lived and spoke in an age of social disintegration. Athens was in imminent moral crisis in the period follow ing the Persian Warsi the victo!)' had been too great and the triumph was bursting the bounds of the society. In this situation. Socrates. in Nietzsche's undemanding, is trying to recover a foundation for morality . Socrates no longer thinks "unconsciousness" (Unbewusstbeit) sufficient or even possible in the turbulence of the times. He thus appears to demand that morality now be grounded in self-conscious reason. And, by requiring a self-conscious explanation of behavior from his interlocutors, he in effect pulls the moral practices out of the soils in which they grew and examines them for their survival capacity. He found it necessary to ground morality in something other than the soil of tradition , from which Greek moral practices had grown. Moral practices were made independent of the environment from which they had sprung and for which they had constituted a necessary and useful buffer. Nietzsche writes ; " Socrates' reaction . . . in praxi ... means that moral judgments have been torn from the conditionality in which they grew and where alone they had meaning . . .. " 17 Nietzsche recognizes full well the dangerous position that Greece was in by the end of the fourth cenrury. Socrates offers a fascinating picture to an Athens already vasrly changed from the idealized virtue of the Cleisthenian period . Here was a man who presents a new and verbal erotic variation on the wrestling meet as a redemption to a decaying Athens. " Degeneration was quietly devdoping everywhere ; old Athens was coming to an end . And Socrates underswod that all the world needed him .... "18 Nietzsche sketches a world for Socrates to counter, a Greece full of both psychic and political potential tyrants, of ascetic passions and an increasingly universal distress. This

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is the beginning of what Gilbert Murray, in a famous phrase, saw as a "failure of nerve." To this extent, Socrates sees as already in himself all the new instincts that are being unleashed in Athens and Greece. His answer to this onslaught is to fight back. [n the Apology, as Nietzsche notes, Socrates finds that he acts for rational reasons and that his instincts - his daemon - only dissuade him. He has mastered his cave of passions ; indeed, it is made quite clear by the end of the Symposium that he has nO[ only mastered them, but has also had full knowledge of them . In Nietzsche's analysis, Socrates becomes, by the control he has developed over his passions, the first " philosopher of life." For all previous philosophers " life served thinking and knowing," that is, " life " was logically prior and not susceptible (0 radical improvement by means of philosophy. For Socrates, on the other hand , philosophy should serve life, for " virtue is teachable." Thus, a new and better life, more subject to the controls that the mind might erect, becomes possible. For Socrates, such philosophy is, in fact , the only hope for a society threatened, as is Greece, with moral chaos. In Nietzsche 's view, by according philosophy and thought a privileged status, Socrates takes the first important step down the road which eventually results in the erection of the ideal worlds of God, Nature, absolute a priori 's, and so forth. Socrates may not have made this move entirely willingly . Nietzsche sees him confronted with a situation in Greek culture in which no alternative other than rational self-control appeared possible or present. "The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation ; there was danger , but there was but one choice: either to perish or to be absu rdly rationaL " 19 But Socrates makes the choice, and such absurd rationality is required precisely because of the desperateness of the situation . Reason, the tip of the psychic iceberg, was all that was recognized . For Nietzsche, in choosing to fight against , Socrates reveals the first flaw in his character: by his attempt to negate what is happening he merely persists in reasserting the dynamics that make possible the Athenian moral and political crisis. " It is self-deception " writes Nietzsche , " for a philosopher and moralist to believe that they escape decadence when they fight against it. This lies beyond their wills, and, though they do not recognize it , one finds that later they

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were the most powerlul conrributors to violence." 20 In the Prologue to Zarathustra, much praise is devoted to those who "go under," that is, who do not srruggle dialectically against that which is sweeping over them. Socrates is then a dialectician, not only in his thought, but also in his life. To this effect, he denies the grounds of presently held beliefs and seeks new justification for them. He engages in verbal agon's with any and all. Inevitably, or so Plato would like it to appear to us, he winS. 21 It is the fac t of his victory, not immediately the nature of it , which is first of all problematic to Nietzsche. Nietzsche argues that the practice of ostracism was used among the Greeks to ensure that no man emerged who was so superior to others as to be the single best man . Should one emerge, he would prevent the agon from continuing, and thus stand outside the community of interaction which made the agon possib le. I will examine the precise po litical significance of the agon in a later chapter; here it is important to see into what position it puts Socrates. If he keeps winning his rationality contest, he is in effect in the position of a new and victorious Thrasymachus. In the Republic, this blustering but likable hothead argues at length for the proposition that justice is what the strong say it is - a version of "to the victor belongs the spoils." Almost the entire first book is taken up with his exchange with Socrates. By the end, Socrates has won Thrasymachus "blushes," becomes ashamed of what he is saying, and "gives up ." Socrates has not convinced Thrasymachus, bur has in effect silenced him. This may say something about courage. It also places Socrates in a strange position . He has in effect gone Thrasymachus one better: through his more powerful logic, he has decided how the discussion of justice will now proceed . Thrasymachus, in the end a far more moral person ·than Socrates (he can still be ashamed), has been literally conquered. Socrates raises the discussion from a political to a philosophical level. But , for Nietzsche. he has disguised the "politics of virtue" implicit in his victory. In fact, Socrates is in danger of becomi ng a new Thrasy mach us. Nietzsche fi nds that " the agonal instinct compelled these born dialecticians to glorify their personal ability as the highest quality.. "21 ~ In dialectics, the danger comes with th e victory ; "nothing is easier to expunge th an the effect of a dialectician ." 23 Socrates is thus caught in a bind. If he keeps [h e fru it of his victory , he neither is

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convincing, nor has he established anything that will serve as a basis to COUnler the decadence ; if he refrains from fighdng. the Greek situation will surely get worse. He is in danger of becoming the best man . As the Greeks understood, this undermined the foundations of the City. The answer, of course, comes in effective self-banishment. Socrates the philosopher-politician-erotic ostracizes Socrates the victor, not "ro roister in Thessaly" as he argues against Crito , but rather ro the skies. By accepting, in fact by demanding punishment from Athens, and by refusing the open gate to flee to another polis, Socrates raises himself and his principle of logic to the ultimate. Plato was seduced into formulating this as the Doctrine of the Forms ; the ideal that governs man becomes nothing more or less than Socrates in nuce.24 It is not surprising that the case of Socrates bothers Nietzsche; the man creates an inaccessible world and then appears to inhabit it. It is as if Socrates had been driven to assert a world (which would eventually find its final formulation in Kant) that was just as unearthly as Cloud-Cuckoo Land and thcn, just as in Aristophanes' Tht Clouds, had in fact taken up residence there. What then does Socrates' immoralism consist of? There is no doubt that he seeks to break the hold of decadence over Greek society. And yet he does not loosen this strangling grip; Nietzsche says again and again that Socrates contributes to the decadence. To adequately explain the nature of the image of Socrates' immoralism , it is necessary to briefly introduce here two of Nietzsche 's rare semitechnical terms. In The Birth of Tragedy, he elaborates a famous distinction betw~n the apollonian and the dionysian . While I shall only later develop these concepts in depth, for the present purposes the following explanation can suffice. For a treatise on the origin of Greek tragedy, the Birth has an absurdly exciting plot. Nietzsche sees art as an anempt by the mist to express his individuality by imposing form on nature. To the degree that an art is dominated "by the laws of plasticity ," it is "apollonian." To the degree that it lacks this quality, it is "dionysian ." Apollo is associated with form , Dionysos with flux. Music is the most dionysian of the arts, because it is practically pure expression of will, requiring little or no external form to exist, and disappearing with its performance. In Schopenhauer's terms, music becomes a copy of the will itself. Classic Aeschylean drama ,

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Nietzsche argues, is an art form that constitutes an apollonian manifestation of music; thus there is a birth of tragedy from the spirit of music. "The dionysian chorus ... again and again newly discharges itself in an Apollonian image world (Bilderwelt I .... (Tragedy 1 is the apollonian materialization [Versinnlichung] of dionysian perceptions and effects (Erkenntnisse und Wirkungen] .... " Tragedy combines an apollonian story with dionysian effects and music - Greek heroes always speak more superficially than they behave 2S - and is definitely successful monumental history. It portrays man in all the depth of which he is capable. Now comes Euripides. In the next chapter, I will give a more detailed consideration of the Euripidean revolution in relation to its social manifestations. Here I only briefly describe his role in the exposition of the plot of Tile Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche claims that Euripides is the first man to make tragedy consciously; he is the first person [0 explicitly attempt by means of his art to "deliver a message" to his audience. In Aeschylean drama, the audience was drawn in [0 the drama ; with Euripides, the drama goes out to the audience. Euripides thus writes tragedy rationally. The effect of the drama is no longer grounded in the unconscious (Unbewusstl, which had been the case in Old Attic drama. This new approach to the world is specifically linked by Nietzsche with Socrates. The reversal of consciousness and instinct is the foundation of a new hierarchy of morality. "Whereas," Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, "in all productive men the instinct is precisely the creative-affirmative power, and the consciousness [Bewusstsein 1 operates in a critical and dissuasive way, in Socrates the instinct becomes critical, and consciousness the creator .... {Herel the logical nature is, by a hypertrophy, developed as excessively as is instinctive wisdom in the mystic." 26 By starting with reason, Socrates and Euripides deny the audience and the polis access to the myths that had served as the unconscious backdrop to the forms of everyday life. "Even the state," writes Nietzsche, " knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation that guarantees its connection with religion and its growth from mythical foundations." When the dissolution of tragedy is thus effectuated, man is left with only the forms of his activiry. With the dissolution of the union of the two deities of tragedy. only rational dialectic advocated by Socrates remains ; to this "there

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correspond [s1 a degeneration and transformation of the Greek people." 27 By these terms Socrates has asserted a purely apo//onian form. Enshrined in the inaccessible heaven of the Forms Nietzsche sees the virtus diaJect;cus, that which would have to be true , if dialectics were the proper and valid way of proceeding with the description of the world. Instead, a method was enshrined and , no matter what Socrates may have hoped for, content becomes unimportant. If dialectics can lead to truth then the question of whether or not truth is conditioned might be ignored . Only the method is important. In a passage cited before, Nietzsche accuses Socrates of ignoring the Bedingtbeit of morality; he has done it by replacing the conditionality of a people with afarm of knowledge . For Nietzsche, the great failing of Socrates is not his immoral innovation, but the manner in which he was immoral. When he broke the horizons of the law he did so in favor of an ultima ratio that was himself, writ in aeternas. And, knowing himself a rationalist out of defense against decadence, he thus enshrined both the decadence and his revolt against it at the same time. With this, the "enormous driving wheel of logical Socratism" is set in motion ; it eventually leads ro " the present age, the result of the Socratism that is bent on the destruction of myth ." 28 Socrates attracts on the grounds of his great insight ; he fails on account of his imention, to teach other men the road to virtue. He knows the cave of appetites, and has mastered them all. His success, however, is due to an "absurd " attachment to reason.29 And, thus attached to Apollo, he taught others to be. He succeeds only too well : as men lost knowledge of the cave of the instincts, they grew accustomed to the blinding daylight of rationality, to the poiD( that they could no longer see in the dark. What, then, is important to Nietzsche about Socrates is his skill. He is the first of those "life virtuosos " who desperately and unsuccessfully try to keep Greece from slipping further imo decadence. Implicit in the notion that virtue can be taught is the fact of virtuosity. Socrates can do anything, make anything seem correct and true. If the proper method is observed , he will , as in Aristophanes' savage attack , legitimate even the turning of son against father , which. for a society to whom the fate of Oedipus is a main mythological pillar, is destructive even more to the city than to the family. With the proper method and form of argument. anyone else might potentially do the same, even foreigners and men with no anachment to the particulars of the polis.

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Nietzsche writes that Socrates' "dialectical skills, so well developed, have no kerneL" His approach consists in "denying everything." 30 The "kernel" is what the genealogical method seeks to recover; it is what characterizes a panicular family. In the case of Socrates, that the kernel is " nothing" is particularly disastrous, for to operate and essay morality under a Socratic cloak means to perpetuate that kernel of nothingness, and Socrates' case was "in the end but the extreme one, only the most obvious of what was beginning to become a cornman distress." 31 The nihilism of the modem age is traced back, in Nietzsche's analysis, [0 the overweaned and ubiquitous negation of the apollonian Socrates. christ: Morality as Foolishness

Socrates, as virtuoso, denies everything. In ancient times, however , the pre-Socratic philosophers had had the excellence to live freely "without thereby becoming fools or virtuosos.")2 In a parody of the Eucharist in the chapter in Zarathustra entitled "The Ass Festival," Nietzsche finds the " higher men " bowing down to the ass who continually brays I-A (ja, Yes) to everything they say . This unselectively affirming animal, who had already appeared as the uncomplaining beast of burden in the first chapter of Zarathustra, accepts all. He is praised by one of the guests at the festival with the poem Nur NaPT"? Nur Dichter! (Only Fool? Only Poet!). H Christ, symbolized here by Nietzsche as the beast of burden who bears all, is the Na" - the other side of the fool-virtuoso opposition, which the great Greek pre-Socratics had successfully avoided. 14 It is generally thought that no matter what his ambivalence about Socrates, Nietzsche was definitely anti-Christ. Yet upon examination, this judgment must be eschewed, for Nietzsche reveals himself at least as ambivalent about Jesus as he was about the Greek. There is a distinct note of admiring jealousy as well as despair at what the man set in motion. Christ is the "noblest man," who wanted "to take the notion of judgment and punishment out of the world." He was the "destroyer of the Jaw .... " JS The list goes on and on. Care must then ~ exercised in the first instance to distinguish what Jesus did and said, from what Christianity became. The Antichrist is in fact filled with this distinction, to the degree that it might easily have been called The Anticbristian; indeed , the German title permits such

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a dc=lightful ambiguity. The distinction is analytic, though. One must also remember that Christ is the ultimate origin of what Christianity became and that he can never be separated from it. "To love man for God's sake - this has so far been the most noble and remote feeling attained among men .... Let him remain to us for all time holy and venerable as th e man who has flown the highest and gone astray the most beautifully." 36 The man in question is Christ. Why , however, is Jesus' the " most noble feeling?" For Nietzsche, Christ takes morality to the point beyond which it cannot go . Jesus' life - which he commands his disciples to emulate - lies already beyond good and evil, outside moral categories as must the life of any lawbreaker. "Jesus said to his Jews: the law was for servants; love God as I have loved him, as his son. What are morals to us sons of God?" n By such love for the world, Christ stands outside moral categories. On this first level, it is possible co split apart what Jesus lived with what Christianity became. For Nietzsche, the villain is St. Paul. Whereas Christ had taught a " new praxis," Paul feels the necessity of emphasizing "guilt and sin." Paul, in fact, erects "in a grand style precisely that which Christ had annihilated through his life." For Nietzsche, it would be an abuse of history to identify such types of decay and unhappiness as "the Christian Church, the Christian faith, and Christian life, with that holy name." "What did Christ deny?" concludes Nietzsche ; "all that is called Christian." 38 Nietzsche lays a continuing emphasis on the differences between the life that Christ lived and the requisites of the faith that evolved to allow people co become epigones of this " most noble" life. Nietzsche sees in Christ's life a unity of god and man, much in the manner that in the mind of the Greeks, the Homeric heroes were close to their God . If one looks only at Christ, one sees "no concept of guilt or punishment"; in fact, "any distance holding apart God and man is abolished." Precisely because the promises of the evangels are unconditional and available universally, the emphasis is not laid on performance in accord with certain standards, but on the practical existence of a person . " Blessedness is never promised ; it is not tied to any conditions.... The deep instinct for how one must live . . . : this alone is the psychological reality of 'redemption .'" It is, says Nietzsche, "a new way of life, not a new faith. " 39 However, the distin ction of master and epigones does not resolve

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the question; it cannot ·be settled in so tasteful and Shavian a manner. To do so well be to equate Nietzsche's views with those of Dostoyevsky , who does not hold Christ responsible for the Grand Inquisitor, but rather sees in Christ's silence merely the recognition of the nature of historical processes. Dostoyevsky seems to share with Hegel the notion that the very fact itself of entering world history results in a necessary perversion and formalization of teaching. For Nietzsche, the manner by which teaching beco mes reified into doctrine bas sometbi11g to do with tbe nature of tbe teaching, with its genealogy. In the case of Christ, as was also true with Socrates, the "kernel" becomes the personality of the man himself. Thus Nietzsche wants to say that traits particular to Christ are responsible for what happened to the evangel as it got into the hands of Paul and later the Church. Somewhere in the genius of Christ's character must be a flaw that doomed even this " most noble life." There is almost a note of despair when Nietzsche first writes that Jesus opposes a " life in truth to ordinary life" and that he combats the "over-inflated importance of the person," and then wonders how Jesus can " want to make it eternal. ... " 40 Christ went wrong: He started an error of world-historical proportions, the end result of which men are still living out. Yet he did so as a lawbreaker, as a man trying to overthrow the dominant moral horizons of his time. As noted in the beginning of this chapter, Nietzsche considers Jesus to haye been a political criminal. Early in 1888, he writes even more strongly : "Jesus denies Church, state, society, art, knowledge, culture, civilization."41 This is to say that Jesus attacks by means of his life all structures and fonns of organization. By demanding a life beyond and outside the law, he effectively makes impossible any of the organized fonns of moral life , and he does so in a universal and nonselective fashion. The life of Christ is anti-form; a holy life shatters conventions. The preliminary consequence is to make Christianity (in the sense of imitatio Christi) possible only as a most private and individual form of life. In the beginning of Zaratbustra, the herald of eternal reruro meets a hermit who has not yet heard that God is dead. Nietzsche indicates that the old man lives a good and possible life. Zarathustra thus does not inform him of the death of God, but hurries on so as to leave the man his solitude and virrue. The lesson is c1ear. lmitatio Christi is possible but only in isolation; it does not permit a common

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moral horizon. "There was only one Christian ," says Nietzsche , "and he died on the croSS." 42, The very imperative toward privacy presents Christ with a problem. He loved everyone, unconditionally; such a great unselfish affirmation destroys all horizons that might give some permanence to his teaching. He cannot be satisfied with the flux consequent to his praxis. No one could . The universality of his love leads to the search for some kind of permanence, Ot redemption. Christ's life will only have significance and justification if in fact all people love him . Unless he makes it necessary for all people to love him , he will disintegrate, since, as a person. he requires and depends on this universal love. Christ thus needs love, and by this need slips inevitably toward morality. He is driven to invert and advocate permanent values, rather than simple praxis. In a very important section of Beyo nd Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues: " It is possible that underneath the holy disguise and fable of Jesus' life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of manyrdom of knowledge about love , the martyrdom of the most innocent and desirous heart which could be sated by no human love. which demanded love and to be loved and nothing else, with hardness, with insanity , with frightful outbreaks against those who denied him love; the story of a man insatiable and unsatiated in love , who had to invent hell in order to send there those who did not want to love him, and who at the end, having grown knowledgeable about human love, had to invent a God who is aU love, all ability to love .... Who so feels , who knows this about love, seeks death." Nietzsche sets off the next sentence: " But why pursue such painful matters? Assuming, of course, that one does not have to. " 41 Christ's need for love drives him to invent an imaginary world , a world of the ideal where redemption is for all. If all can be loved , all will be loved ; there will be no reason to exclude anyone or anything. The implication of a world in which there are no boundaries or horizons - the love is for all unconditionally and uncritically - is, in Nietzsche's understanding, a disappearance of all criteria that permitted man to determine what was real. And , as already pointed out, in a world without horizons or criteria, there will be no rank, no way to tell one person from another. 44 The democratization inherent in universal love makes it impossible to tell who is like whom .

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The form of authority implicit in Christ's universal love is the equality of all before a universal Father, who, in turn , has an inexhaustible love for all his children . "All men are equal before the Father" can be maintained as long as there is a Father. In this context, the "death of God" acquires an added significance as the moment when th e last horizon of authority, perhaps the most tenuous and absttact of all in Nietzsche's eyes, finally disappears, leavi ng men with no means of recognizing who might be in the same moral world as themselves. Until the death of God, there is, however, significance to the evangels and the " redeemer type." The "glad tidings" of the evangels totally annihilate the distance between God and man. All is blessed. Salvation is thus not promised - it is simply a given fact. A Christian can only be a Christian, ~hen, if he leads a "Christian life," not because he might profess something. Men are known by their fruits, not their words, and thus known only in their life. Thus, for Nietzsche, a ttue Christian "makes no distinctions," and "does not grow angry with anyone." 4S Like Christ, a true Christian in Nietzsche's sense is not really moral. His life does not conform to certain moral laws ; he is those laws, what some monastic orders call appropriately a "living rule." The gospels can be seen as "means of seduction by means of morality."-46 The assurance of salvation means that as long as one is alive the sign of a Christian lies not in conformity to certain propositions, but in his life . Morality as such is promised, a reward necessarily consequent to such a life. In Nietzsche's understanding, the Christian is "seduced " by morality , by being promised the rewards of moral behavior, namely redemption, before the fact. He is then expected to live a life that is Christian in spirit. Since the redeemer "accepts all,"47 external behavior becomes unimportant and gives way to an emphasis overwhelmingly placed on " inner reality.,,48 This is why the old man in Zarathustra can, in his isolation, live as a Christian. Nietzsche writes

that even though there "are no Christians at all" any more, "genuine , original Christianity is possible at all times," but only as a private way of Iife. 49 In this context, it is worth noting that the old hermit does not talk with anyone, but rather "sings" with the birds; speech would make privacy impossible, unless the other be as gentle as Zarathustta. Such original Christianity, however, has no way to deal with

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historical question. It is successful only in private. But, when confronted with the social world, the distorcions that Nietzsche attribute~ to St . Paul become the only possible organizing tools. In practice, this requires that the emphasis no longer be placed on the practical life of Christ, but rather on rules and moral principles. With this change, Christianity is thrust up into the clouds and is rc:moved from the earth . A Christian -existence now must be centered in a mcneal construct, in an imagined "beyond ... 'SO The effect is the same as that of Socrates' insistence on form . From an entirely opposite direction, the " kernel" of such a life is also nothing. The emphasis on the privacy of the individual destroys the foundations of that which made a common life, and thus culture, possible. In a passage from Antichrist, Nietzsche is quite specific about the consequences of Christianity for communality . When one places life's center of g~vity not in life, but in the "beyo nd" - in nothingness - one has deprived life of irs center of gravity altogether. The great lie: of personal immortality destroys a ll reason, all that is natural in the in· stincts - everything in the instincts that is beneficial, pn:serving of life, or guarantor of the future , now arouses mistrust. To Jive so thai [here is no longer any S65 At the high point of the drama, the godhead Dionysos himself appears as necessary illusion . This is "[he apollonian complement of [the audience--chorusl state"; by it, the tragedy can assume a unified, perfect, and repeating vision. The spectator can see himself as the

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chorus, which in turn sees Dionysos ; the god is an illusion and apollonian, but it is me illusion characteristic of the state the chorus is in. Thus, there is a unification of Apollo and Dionysos in a perfect image. The audience is whoUy in the world of the play and, through the perfect illusion , fi nds the dramatic world whole and perfect, it is no accident that Dionysos is dismembered and reborn. The spectators never have to cOllsider, as audience, the question of origins. Instead, the play solves mat question mrough a circular "illusion " mat constantly informs me audien ces. The origins are always sensuously there: through these operations they become a foundation for the audience. Aeschylus confronts the problems of values in situations where the old horizons no longer appear to hold , or have, at best, ambiguous reference. The end of the Oresteia portrays a situation in which a potentially threatening individualism, which Orestes feels obliged to embody, is redirected into a renewed moral community. Sins there are punished on mis earth, and the resolution is generally viewed as social in nature ; the drives the Furies represent must also be integrated into Amens. In Th e Persians, the Danaides must also be admitted as part of the legitimate past: Argos cannot by an act of will deny what it has been. Presumably in the lost Prometheus Unbound, the reborn Titan would have come back down from his rock . Nietzsche refers to the function of myth as that of a " noble deception" and would seem to suggest with these words something analogous to the Platonic conception of me " noble lie," which formed the public basis of the state in me Republic. It protects me Greeks against too close contact with the real foundation of meir culture; Nietzsche find s that me Greeks fear me "extraordinary strength of their dionysian and political instincts," and sees in tragedy the politically happy combination of myth and music which permitted a healthy culture to live. In what he calls "only a preliminary expression of mese difficult ideas [which] . . . are immediately intelligible only to few," Nietzsche writes: " Between the universal validity of its music and the listener, receptive in his dionysian state, rragedy places a sublime metaphor IGleichnis l , the myth , and awakes in the spectator me illusion, as mough the music were only the highest means (Darstellungsmittel ) toward the animation [Be/ebung ) of the plastic world of the myth." 66 The world of

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illusion created by the tragedy serves as the continuing and repetitive basis for the renewal of the state. This permits the reconciliation of the dark knowledge "into the ttue nature of things" with the " uniformly vigorous effusion of the si mplest political feeling." Nietzsche then argues, in a passage shortly before the one cited above, that the illusion generated by the tragi c arts made it possible for Greece to avoid th e pure politicization of Rome and the "ecstatic" evaluations of Indian Buddh ism. " Placed between India and Rome, and pushed toward a seductive choice. the Greeks succeeded in inventing a third form , in classical purity." A form of association was foun d such that each individual could express himself fully. This required that they live inside the same horizon of illusion ; for the agonistic confli ct, which makes greatness possible, to continue, the interaction generated by the illusions of tragedy were prerequisite. One might object that all of this sounds very "un-Nictzschean ." Such talk of moral communities and rejuvenation of culture clashes with the resonances of "free spirit" and "Prinz Vogelfrei ." But what has been made of Nietzsche is not always what N ietzsche is. Aeschylus, much as Socrates and Christ. stands outside his community; he was even accused of profaning the mysteries. He is successful , or almost so, in a way that Christ and Socrates were not, because he managed to recover horizons for the world where virtuous action remained possible. Such rragi c art is a form of domination;67 it makes the world appear wonh living in . The genius, Nietzsche says, while speaking of tragic artists, has " th e power to hang a new net of illusion around the world. " 68 A second main theme which emerges from Nietzsche's appreciation of Aeschylus is the full recognition of the nature of human responsibility. No longer is the fact that a god made one do something an excuse. Whereas in the early play Seven Against Thebes Eteocles had been able to argue in a Homeric fashion that it was " the god that drove the matter on," later Aeschylus requires his characters to take upon themselves the guilt fo r what they were blindly obliged to do. Thus, Orestes in The Eumenides says: I plead guilty Apollo sharcs the respo nsibility, He rou nterspurred my heart....

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This is my case. Where my fate falls, I shall accept. 69

Much like Heraclitus before him, Aeschylus IS saying that character is destiny."70 There can be no separation , no matter what the outcome, of a person and his acts. If the jury decides against Orestes, he is fated guilty , he is guilty. For Nietzsche, the virtue of Aeschylus lies in the quality of his art. The Oresteia, after all , is at one very imporrant level the depiction of two conflicting principles of law seeking allegiance from the Athenians. The narrow decision of the jury in favor of Orestes and " young laws" justifies a new form of legitimacy. Hen ceforth , it is at least conceivable in Athens that the requirements of the polis may necessitate the death of mothers. This was no easy argument to a society that had barely made the transition from the dominance of the cult of the Great Mother to some form of patriarchy. That Aeschylus succeeds in grounding his justification of the new system in a world that could srill call upon the authority of both Homer and the oldest myths is no mean feat. To the degree that he is convincing, the Greek state \vill live through the painful social and psychological transitions it undergoes. His success, of course, is neither complete, nor lasting. For reasons having partly to do with his an, but more with the unyielding historical situation wh ich Athens confronts, Aeschylus begins to appear to his publi c as the man of Athens' noble past , rather than of the present. A sympathetic portrait has come down in the comedies of Aristophanes. (I shall consider Nietzsche 's analysis of his failure more closely in the following chapter.) In Athens, new dramatists rapidly claimed the allegiance of the Greek audi~nces. Foremost among these are Sophocles and Euripides. It is to them that I now tum. Nietzsche gives very short consideration to Sophocles and , accordingly, I shall also . Nietzsche seems to think of Sophocles as a great author who could speak most strongly to Athens only in the short period that constitutes a lull before the storm of the Peloponnesian War. In some ways, Sophocles attempts to finish the task of Aeschylus. In the earlier playwright, the problem is to deal with the continuing onslaught of the new ; what the gods want is not known and constitutes the problem to be solved. In Sophocles, on the other

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Euripides wants to address the same social problems with which Sophocles and Aeschylus had dealt. In Aeschylus, the problem of value choices in a changi ng historical and social situation is resolved by the reintegration of the spectators into a mythic framework making possible a rejuvenated and vital understanding of thei r ac· tions. The problem of meaning and social change is also addressed in the first chorus srrophe of Hippolyws When [ remember that the Gods take thought fo r human life, often in the hours of grief to me this faith has brought comfort and heart's rdid. Yet though deep in my hope perception lies wistful, experience gwws Qlld faith recedes; Men's fortunes fall and rise Not answering to their deeds. Change follows change Jale purposeless and blind Uproots us from familiar soil.

Several 1. 2. 3.

points appear important. Intellect is destructive of old tradition . There is no justice in the relation of act and reward. The workings of change make old habits impossible - volens nolem. Th us the si tuation forming the plot of the play - the fatal and unnatural love of Phaedra for her son, her suicide, Theseus ' curse and Hippolytus' death - is ascribed to no one 's ultimate respo nsibility before or after the fact. Hippolytus' " tragic fl aw" is at the most priggish ness. However, whereas the Sophoclean and Aeschylean hero takes upon himself the gu ilt accruing to him through the faul ts of his ancestors, th e Euripidean hero is not finally culpable. Indeed, it would be difficult to make a tragic hero out of Hippolytus wilting his own priggishness. All the principals are th us excused fro m all guilt in the proceedings. The play is brought to an end, as always in Euripides, by the deus ex maciJina, in this case Artemis. She absolves Hippolytus and his father, together they forgive Phaedra, Hippolytus dies (assisted by the chorus), and all praise his nobility. What causes Hippolyrus' downfall is not hubris; even less it is a curse inherited from his ancestor s fo r which he had to shoulder responsibility. It is, rather, a very commonplace fault. All in all the message of Hippo/ytllS seems to be, firs dy, that there is no escape

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hand, the gods pose no new and significant problems. Rather, having accepted the Olympian revolution implicit in the concerns of Aeschylus, the problem in the writings of Sophocles becomes the lack of knowledge that men have of themselves. There arc no competing deities in Oedipus the King. The task is the nature of self-knowledge in the new social situation represented by the monarchy of paternal descent. Oedipus is the son of his father , despite himself; he still must understand this. 71 Nietzsche is concerned with the problems of change. He can thus pass over Sophocles as representing an unfortunately temporary respite from the ferocity of Greek politics. He considers him mainly in the notes preparatory to the writing of The Birth of Tragedy; as opposed to the two other great dramatists, Sophocles is hardly mentioned thereafter. The key figure for Nietzsche is. of course, Euripides. With Aristophanes in The Frogs. Nietzsche sees Euripides as the important opposition to Aeschylus; and again as with Aristophanes, he finds in favor of the older writer. At first glance though, it might seem strange for Nietzsche to dislike Euripides. 72 The Euripidean view of the universe certainly has no more obvious order than that of Nietzsche. There are no higher truths; the behavior of the gods is only slightly more ignoble than that of mortals. Such a reading, however, presupposes that Nietzsche's quarrel with Euripides is primarily with his doctrine. It is my contention that this is misleading. As with Wagner, whose music Nietzsche finds "never true," so with Euripides, whose art must be called into question. No less than Aeschylus does Euripides seek to educate and instruct his audience , it is the manner by which he seeks to do this that Nietzsche would tondemn. Euripides writes in a time of social disintegration ; old standards are falling away, no new ones have yet arisen to take their place. If Athens has solved the problems of political organization inherent in becoming a polis, it is not coping very well with the problems inherent in the resultant individualism. No one has described this general situation better than Thucydides. When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit funher and funher 2nd de1ermined 10 outdo the report of all who had preceded them in the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocities of their revenges. The meaning of words no longer had the same: reb.tion to

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a peripheral relationship. 76 In a real sense, there are hardly characters at all. In the end, the plays are about ideas, and the confli ct of persons or social forces is replaced by the conflict of the ideas. The crime and the downfall of each person - it is hard to find a central character - comes from their respective denial of what each of the other characters symbolizes. Thus in Hippo/ytus, Phaedra symbolizes Aphrodite; she carries this trait to excess and is countered by her son, who is matronized by Artemis. Each of these "inverted cripples," as Nietzsche called them in Zarathustra, embodies a necessary, if human - all-roo-human - trait. They all come OUt , then, on a roughly equal basis. As Arrowsmith puts it, " the characters are no longer people but specifications of the shaping ideas of the play. " 77 The resolutions of the plays are of dialectical character rather than genealogical; they require the traditional deus ex macbina to bring a halt to the proceedings. If, as Wirtgenstein put it, men are unable to cease philosophizing when they want to, so also Euripidean drama can never resolve naturally. It has no other ending than the mechanical. This structure and these characters are hardly appropriate to the creation of great cathartic heroes. Here, I must differ from the understanding of Arrowsmith, who sees the Euripidean universe merely as devoid of order. Euripides is concerned with redemption from the blind order of the universe . For instance, in Hippolytus, Artemis announces at the end : Your sin is great. Yet even you may find pardon for what you have done. For it was Aphrodite who to satisfy Her resentment willed that all This should happen: and there is an Order (moira l in the world that no one should seek to Frustf2te another's purpose ... . You did nOt know The truth ... This frees yo u from the deepest guilt.

Euripides becomes a Schopenhauer of the intellect. Virtue (ies in resigned acceptance, in the pessimism of weakness. In Ipbigenia in Tauris, Thoas is considered wise when he proclaims at the end : To hear a God's command and disobey is madness.... No honor comes of measuring srrength with the Gods.

It is immediately apparent that this is not exactly a Promethean

conception of virtue.

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things, but was ch.mged by them as they thought proper... . Frantic energy was held to be the true quality of a man .... The scal of good fait h was not divine law. but fellowship in erime. 73

According to legend, Euripides was born on the day of the battle of Salamis. This, the signal victory of the Greeks over the Persians, marks for Nietzsche the beginning of the end of the Greece that Aeschylus seeks to preserve. "The Persian Wars," he writes, "are the national disaster. .. . The danger was too great and the victory tOO overwhelming." 74 Most specifically, the wars bring out in the Athe· nians the desire to dominate the rest of Greece, both politically and culturally. Thucydides details the resultant chaotic individualism, and the plays of Euripides in their own way are as much attempts as are those of Aeschylus to bring some new pose and definition to the changing world. As William Arrowsmith has noted : "There is a new spirit of divisiveness abroad in the Hellenic world : appearance and reality, nature and tradition move steadily apart under the destructive pressure of war and its attendant miseries. ... It is my belief that the theater of Euripides is a radical and revolutionary attempt to record, analyze and assess that reality in relation to the new view of human nature which the crisis revealed. lin At the sour~ of this attempt lies Euripides' different treatment of the relation of audien~ and spectator. In Aeschylus, the medium of the dionysian chorus of capric satyrs is the vehicle by which the audien~ is brought on stage and bound up into the myth. Euripides does quite otherwise. In the eleventh chapter of The Birth of Trag· edy, Nietzsche repeats the accusation against Euripides already com· mon in Athens: "Euripides brought the spectator on stage .... Through him the everyday man forced his way from the spectators' seats onto the stage .. .. The spectator now actually saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage, and rejoi~d that he could talk so well. As a poet, Euripides feels superior to the masses he brings on stage. And, sin~ these masses oppose each other, evaluation of the playas a whole becomes difficult. To fully understand the conse· quen~s of this it is necessary to look somewhat more deeply into the mechanics of this drama. The driving force in Euripides does not seem to be a person or hero after the manner of Prometheus Bound. Rather, one sees the working out of impersonal forces, to which the characters really have II

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from external fate and, secondly, that mortals can best meet this by circumspection and prudence. Thus, Theseus is admonished for giving " no room to question of the slow scrutiny of time." Nietzsche does not leave the matter here. He asks himself why Euripides feels obliged to structure his plays around one dimensional characters embodying the various emotions and ideas that exist in the public, to show the dangers of their interaction and, fi nally, to counsel prudence and the recognition of the fallibi lity of one's countrymen, with a cautious pessimism about the general state of the world . " Fate" is " purposeless and blind"; it is because of this blind ' order that men are relieved from ultimate responsibility. As noted before, in Nietzsche's view, Euripides as poet feels superior to those he puts on stage; how then can he refuse the Aeschylean form of resolution ? Euripides sees the problem, which he presents as the incommensurability of human desires and ideas due to a lack of prudence and definition. Nietzsche argues that Euripides had, of course. been to representations of old Attic drama and had sat in th~ th~uer, and striven to recognize in the masterpieces of his grell predecessors, as in paintings that have become dark, feature after feature, line after line. And here he had experienced something that should no t surprise anyone initiated into t he deeper secrets of Aeschylean tragedy. He had observed something incommensurable in every feature rod line, a certain deceptive distinctness and at the same time an enigmatic depth , indeed an infinitude of background . .. . A similar twilight shrouded the structure of the drama, especially the significance of t he chorus. And how dubious the solution of the eth ical problems remained to him! How questio nable the lTeatment of myths! How unequal t he distribution of good and bad fortune! Even in the language of the older tf2gedy there was much he fo und offensive, or at least enigmal ic; especially he fo und too much pomp for simple affairs, tOO many tropes and monstrous expressions [0 suit the plainness of the characters. So he sat in the theater, pondering uneasily, rod as a specutor he confessed to hi mself t hat be did "Ot u"denta"d bis great predecessors. 78

The plain m~ssage of this imagination is that Euripides is too critical to permit himself to accept older drama . For Euripides, to do the right in this historical situation requires knowledge; Nietzsche attributes to him the sentiment that "s inc~ Aeschylus cr~ated un consciously. he ~ated wrongly." Hence. none of Euripides' plays can embody the principles of right ; instead , these come self-consciously

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from the playwright. Euripidean drama becomes " naturalistic": it provides intelligible comments on social practices in order to educate the audience . At this point, Nietzsche notes that one must go below the simple notion that Euripides puts the masses on stage and makes them speak beautifully. If that were true, the public should embrace Euripides as their ideologist. Instead, notes Nietzsche, he suffers many failures. For the only voices he accepts as legitimizing his enterprise are not those of the public, but of himself as critical intellect, and of Socrates. Neither of these spectators has any esteem for tragedy as it had been practiced - they are both too critical - and this necessitates a radical structuring of the dramatic conception. Euripides, along with Socrates, is concerned to educate the Athenian public. Nietzsche sees him " in torment" from his lack of comprehension of the older drama. So instead of relying on the audience to put the meaning of the play together for itself through reliance on "a noble artistry which ... masks the necessary elements and makes it appear accidental," Euripides announces in his prologues (usually given by an unimpeachable source, such as a god) exactly what is going to happen . In Aeschylus, the spectator had to make something real for himself ; the play was so structured as to make that possible. In Euripides, the spectator is faced with an imellectual task and no longer a dramatic one. It is, as Arrowsmith remarks, a " theater of ideas." Nietzsche sees the poet as "an echo of his own conscious knowledge." For Nietzsche, this constitutes the bond between Euripides and Socrates. 79 Both men feel obliged to rely on their conscious reason for the effect they are seeking to reach . They both wish to didactically teach something to their audiences. Neither man, as ideal spectator, can accept the illusion that had completed the dionysianapollonian unity in Aeschylean drama. To them Dionysos was simply unintelligible. As Nietzsche says, Euripides, then, has "abandoned Dionysos," and thus Apollo abandons him. He often treats the same myths as do the earlier dramatists; but he renders the underworld which gave those myths power inaccessible by his de=:termination to make=: the problems intelligible, and thus substitutes "naturalistic effects," "Now," writes Nietzsche, "the virtuous hero must be a dialectician; now there must be a necessary visible connection betwee=:n virtue and knowledge, faith and morality ; now the transcen-

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dental justice of Aeschylus is degraded into [he superficial and insolent principle of 'poetic justice' with its customary deus ex macbina. "110 This criticism of Euripides-Socrates raises an important point. Nietzsche would argue that some forms of acceptance or understanding, what I have called the unquestioned , simply do not admit of heing didactically taught. Either they are presented in such a way that they penetrate below conscious assessing, or else they are simply unmeaningful. As Stanley Cavell has remarked in relation to the style and purpose of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: " Either the suggestion penetrates past assessment and becomes part of the sensibility from which the assessment proceeds, or it is philosophically useless." 81 In trying to tell Athens what he feels it should know about itself, Euripides is precisely in the same position Nietzsche as Zarathuscra is in at the beginning of Thus Spoke ZaTatbustra. They both have a good grasp of the problem - Euripides of Athens, and Zarathusna of the crowd in the marketplace of the town called The Piebald Cow. But they are both talking at their audience. Zarathusrra finds that he is obliged to reject this approach, for there "are not yet ears" for what he has to say. It is simply not possible to tell his audience what he wants them [Q know. Euripides however persists; Nietzsche's understanding of his last play, the Baccbae, in which Dionysos seems to return, prest=nts a Euripides already expressing fear and anxiety over the social consequences of his earlier plays. The fault that Nietzsche finds with Euripides and Socrates is that they attempt to teach virtue, or at least a method by which virtue can be attained. He sees them roughly in the position of a (bad) psychiatrist who when confronted with a severely neurotic patient would say "Here is what you are going to do today." The patient might follow the instructions of the doctor on that day, and indeed for many days; but unless at one point he can make a jump to being able to figure out for and by himself what he should do, one would hesitate to call him cured. Teaching, it would seem, is an activity that can only meet with success when there is already a community of experience. One can '[ teach or tell someone something unless the other person would be in a position to ask for that particular thing. Unless there were a preexistent community (of the unquestioned), telling something to someone, or trying to teach him virtue, is likely to be an expedition on the wrong path. 82

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Euripides can never reach his aim. What, however, is the effect of attempting to teach virtue? In an early manuscript, Nietzsche develops this problem in terms of the structure of tragedy. In older Attic drama, there had originally been no dialogue. As can still he s«n to a great extent in a play like Seven Against Thebes, there is no dialectic or combat of ideas. "In the exchange between the hero and the leader of the chorus, the dialectical struggle was impossible because of the subordination of one to the other. However, as soon as two equal principal characters confronted each other, there grew up , in accordance with deep Hellenic drives. the conrest [Wettkamp!1 and in fact the conrest with word and argument [mit Wort und Grundl . .. ." 83 The net result is to create a tension in the spectator and to deny the educational unity that the older tragedy seeks to effect in the hero . There is a "dualism of style, here the power of music, there that of the dialectic," and the gradual triumph of the latter. Much as he was later to describe the triumph of the slave morality over that of the master, Nietzsche argues that this is mainly due to a new appreciation of the role of the intellect. Virtue becomes knowable through thought, that is, it can be Mugllt. In one powerful and marvelous senrence Nietzsche compressed the whole relation of tragedy and Euripides-Socratism. " We,m Tugend Wissen ist, so muss der wgendbafte Held Dialektiker sei"." " If virtue is knowledge, then the virtuous hero must be a dialectician." 84 Nietzsche's key accusation against the new conception is that it changes the basis of virtue. Virtue can now be taught and is thus democratically accessible to all comers; it is no longer appropriate or relative to an individual or class, but universally available. Being universal, it is forced to become abstract and acquires the false aura of not being subject to historical change. In a fragment that was to be part of the section on Socrates in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche states; "Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical. ... It is for all and popular; for it bolds virtue to be teachable." 85 Virtue is removed from the realm of the ethische Instj"kte whose air Heraclitus and Aeschylus had breathed, and is made an abstract goal ro be reached. Nietzsche's hostility to this should not thereby be interpreted as a preference for blind instinct and anti-inrellectualism. Rather, for Nietzsche, as for Wittgenstein, the justification of the realm of moral values is not something that can be done on its own

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terms. A person cannot be convinced by rules without accepting the whole world of discourse in which the rules and teaching operate. To use Wittgensteinian terminology: the language-game of moral grounding does not contain that of didactic tcaching. For Nietzsche, no matter what their intention , Socrates and Euripides remove values from the immediacy of experience, absolutize them, and tend to endow conclusions with validity independently of the social and historical situations giving rise to them. In Nietzsche's understanding, Socratic teaching gives some order to the world and makes doing the good dependent on the lessons one may learn from those who teach virtue. In his attempt to bring order to the political and moral chaos that was Greece at that time, Socrates finds it necessary co establish a science of ethics ; to the degree that he succeeds, the preservation of the tragic, let alone of the heroic world, becomes impossible. Tragedy, after all, depends, as does much of the ethos of the Iliad, on the fact that intentions often turn out to be irrelevant to the moral problems that are confronted . In Homer or Aeschylus there is no obvious, point by point relation between the choices an individual makes, and the outcome to which he submits. The action is the unfolding of a person's character, and character, as Aeschylus remarks, is destiny. If, as with Euripides, one tries to make choices on the basis of the accurate knowledge of the prudential consequences of one's actions, heroics and the tragic are impossible - impossible to this extent, Sheldon Wolin has pointed out, that in the early Christian world (which Nietzsche sees as the ftrst extension of Socratism), the notions of the Second Coming and the Last Judgment become the final straws on the back of an already over-burdened heroic world. 86 The results of the work of Euripides and Socrates seem to make necessary that one think that responsibiLity comes only through intellectual awareness; if so, one must develop a method of making men aware enough to be responsible. For Nietzsche, this becomes the optimistic doctrine that men can, through dint of persevering with the right (inrellecrual) tools, shape the world in their own image. 87 If, however, the problem rather lies. as Nietzsche thinks it does, with men themselves, then Socratism in no way provides a manner by which to change men such that they will not simply replay their own genealogical problems, in their attempt co control the world. The above considerations establish that Nietzsche's criticism of

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Socrates and Euripides centers around what he believes to be their contention that the intellect and learned moral skills can be a sufficient counter to the chaos then buffeting Athens. The tool they center on is the dialectical method as enshrined in the dialogues and embodied in the characters in Euripides' plays. It makes virtue at least appear teachable; through it, they hope. Athens may be set on the path to some sort of health. Yet Nietzsche contends, as we have already seen in Chapter IV. that the dialectical method necessarily affirms not only the proposed remedy, but also the decadence of its proponent. Nothing is ever really accomplished. I might leave Nietzsche's appreciation of Socrates here: it looks much like the image that has come down to us in The Clouds. Nietzsche's choice would appear to be much like that of Aristophanes in The Frogs : in favor of Aeschylus and the recovery of the old gods. A problem remains, though. The criticisms that Nietzsche launches against Socrates (and at this point we may ignore the problematic relation to Euripides) are very close to those that Socrates himself makes of Protagoras. As already seen, Nietzsche rejects the position of Protagoras as narrow and overly anthropocentric. Socrates. Nietzsche also says, is so close to him " that only for to recognize it, I am almost constantly engaged in struggle with him. " 88 This famous citation, already examined in part above. can now be unpacked some more. What is Nietzsche's relation to Socrates which he has to fight at every tum? A brief examination of the dialogue Protagoras is instructive, for, appropriately enough, it deals with the possibilities of teaching virtue, and presents some of Socrates' conclusions about the claim that it is possible, and thus also about the responsibilities and nature of teaching. After an early awakening. Socrates is drawn by a youthful enthusiast to the house of Callias. a sort of Athenian Fulbright Fund, which maintains open house, bed , and board for visiting sophists. There is an initial encounter with Hippias, a man who believes that "custom is the tyrant of mankind," and is peremptorily dismissed as a man who utters words the consequences of which he does not know. Socrates then turns to Protagoras. They agree to a public discussion where only matters of general and popular concern, as opposed to any private secrets and feelings, can come up. Protagoras, much as Euripides, claims that virtue (in this case civic and moral virtue) can be taught. Socrates, surprisingly

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enough . denies this at first. The argument goes through a long and tortuous set of indirections. But, at last, Socrates argues that virtue in fact consists of doing what is honorable and good, and therefore (as he has shown) also pleasurable. However. as Socrates then righ tly observes about his own position, it is something that can be taught. So, he says his position seems to have reversed itself. 89 The actual conclusion of the dialogue is problematic for it appears inconclusive. Socrates, having noted his apparent self-reversal, states also that they still have not decided what virtue is. even though they have decided to break off. At this point Socrates has not attacked the Epimetheus myth which Protagoras proposed at the beginning of the dialogue. He now states that he still prefers Prometheus to Epimetheus, or at least will in the future make use of him to determine exactly what virtue is. Epimetheus means hindsight ; Prometheus, of course. foresight. By this comment, Plato may wish to tell the reader thar the kind of virtue Protagoras talks about exists, but that it is the virtue of hindsjght, or afterthought. One of the reasons that good men do not always have good sons is that they can only teach them what virtue was in the past, and not how to determine what it is go ing to be in the future. This virtue of hindsight would be precisely the result of Protagoras' pain-pleasure calculation which in almost all cases can give a guide to action solely on the basis of past experience. It is, in fact, the necessary result of any system, based simply on a method, which accepts present realities as both subject and object of the method . Such a method, when accepted, determines the conclusions that will be reached and limits them sharply to the manipulation of the already existent - in the Protagoras, to the opinions of the many . (This, in cidentally, may give a clue to Nietzsche protestations aga inst herd morality, for, if anything is wrong with Athens, it is the Athenians.) The true nature of Socrates' opinion on the question of teaching virtue is obscure in this dialogue. At first , he seems to advocate the position that it cannot be taught ; this sharply contrasts with Nietzsche's evaluation of his position . At this point, he attacks Protagoras' view that it can be taught on the grounds that virtue is someching that cannot be taught in the manner that a skill can. By the end, though, he appears to have accepted precisely the position that Nietzsche would sadd le him with. Any way out of this dilemma is problematic and speculative. A clue is given though, I think, by the

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fact that on one level it is obviously true that some virtue can be taught in the manner that Protagoras advocates. Knowledge of what gives pain and pleasure is useful knowledge, and is probably some part of the knowledge necessary for virtue. Socrates also treats Protagoras with much more respect than he accords to, say, Hippias, who holds opinions that Socrates does not even consider worth talking about. The fact that Socrates winds up appearing to agree with Protagoras indicates to me that he does not feel it necessary to thoroughly discredit Protagoras in th is public place they have so conspicuously been arguing in. No matter what Socrates' position may in reality be, he would then think that Protagoras' position is of some potential usefulness to th e ciry. If th is be so, then Socrates is making a judgment relative to Protagoras and Athens: the social-historical situation of Athens is not such that one need th rowaway all moral knowledge based on the pain -pleasu re calculus, that is, on the past and inh erited knowledge. Can the reader assume th is amount of tortuousness in both Socrates and Nietzsche? We are left in a difficult position . One may refuse to admit that Socrates' treatment of this question in the Protagoras conta ins a judgment of the sorts of remedies appropriate - or at least not dangerous - to Athens. Or else, one may accept the view that Nietzsche is simp ly opposed to Socrates. If the latter view is taken , one can judge Nietzsche either correct or foo lish; both conclusions, though, are problematic, sin ce too many texts indicate an ambivalence - both an admiration and an accusation . In each case, the whole question of what it means to try and teach virtue in a particular historical situation (and Nietzsche is nothing if not conscious of his place and supposed role in a particular time in history) is not resolved , nor is it apparent why Nietzsche might thereby have felt any attraction to the pale Athe nian. Finally. one thereby prej udices Nietzsche's intelligence without searching for an explanation that makes sense of all these eleme nts. To resolve this, I can only suggest that the fo llowing seems possible. Nietzsche rejects for himself the position th at Socrates appears to accept at the end of the Protagoras. He may do so fo r one of two reasons. One. he believes it to be Socrates' true and only position. This cannot be refuted directly, but may be viewed as unsatisfactory. I have already given considerations as to Nietzsche's double attitude toward Socrates. Nietzsche also goes beyond what he calls the

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niaiserie of Protagoras 90 in much cht: samt: way that Plato dot:S with cht: same philosopht:r in cht: Theatetus . For instance , attacking tht: notion of human-ct:ntt:rt:d pt:rception as cht: dt:tt:rminant of truch, Plato wondt:rs why "Protagoras did not bt:gin his book on truch wich cht: dt:claration that a pig or a dog-faced baboon or somt: otht:r strange monster which has sensation is tbe measure of all things." 91 Nit:tzscht:, wht:n spc:aking of tht: physiological dt:mands for the preservation of a certain type of life, indicates that such judgements may be a foolishness which "is precisely necessary for the preservation of bt:ings such as we are - assuming, of courst:, that not just man is the measure of all things." 92 It is of cou~ true that Socrates-Plato and Nietzsche go in very different directions with this condemnation, but they both reject the Protagorean premise. There is a second possibility. Nietzsche may judge wrong Socrates' assumption that the Protagorean notions were at best inoffensive in Athens for that time. In any case, Nietzsche certainly finds the effect of such a notion disastrous in the time in which Nietzsche lives. h might be objected that one could always find anotht:r unda-scanding of Socrates; Nit:tzscht: would t(:tort that the Socrates of the end of the Protagoras is the effect of the teaChings of Socrates whetht:r or not Socrates would have admitted to it ; afta all, if character is destiny, dt:stiny is also charactt:r_ The utilitarian approach apparently advoated in public by Socrates (and recognized as tht: basis of somt: sort of primitivt: virtue) assumes tht: prt:senct: of social conditions chat would, at kast, not makt: it dt:scructive. Such conditions might be, say, thost: of upper-middle-class Englishmen. As we saw in Chapter IV, it is not surprising that in the early nint:tt:enth exntury they do persuade themselves of the truthfulness of a utilitarian approach. But this choiex presupposes a viable ongoing public world in which mt:n can continue to intt:ract wich reasonablt: expt:ctation of not harming tht:mselves through choiexs made on tht: basis of knowkdge of tht: past. If, however, it should no longer be possible to choose in such social situations because of modern developmt:nts (themselves the rt:sult of those prt:mises and choiexs), then this fonn of "virtue" becomes dangerous. If the Athenian situation was as bad as Thucydides describes it, tht: virtut: based on pain-pleasure calculations will merely further tht: selfish · and private individualism already rampant in the cities. Tht: samt: would apply to modem times. Socratt:s tht:n at tht: very It:ast made a mistakt: in his evaluation of

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the: Athe:nian world . For Nietzsche, the laws that Socrates upheld in the Crito by refusing to e:scape the hemlock bc=nefited only Socrates; in te:rms of Athe:ns, Nie:tzsche: thinks the:y should have: bc=e:n broke:n and that Socrate:s should have escaped. From the perspective of the end of the: nine:tec=nth century, Socrate:s holds it still possible: to propose a teaching that would ensure a certain form of behavior, while never calling into que:stion its basic premises. Socrate:s bc=lieve:s that men might do one: thing and ye:t achie:ve: anothe:r j in this case:, the:y might act on the basis of pain-pleasure calculations and yet further the: moral foundations of the state. The fact that Socrates was require:d to choose the dialectic for this task guaranteed, however, that he set in motion those processes that led eventually to nihilism . After more than two millennia, those processes have taken their toll. To work at all, they rc=quire: the: continuing e:xiste:nce: of a social and public realm that can be fostere:d by private behavior based on the Protagore:an crite:ria, The foundation of Niet'Zsche 's criticism of Socrates is then that such a public world no longer exists, and thus cannot be preserved through actions that rc=sted on fundamentally wrong pre:ml5es. All is now private: this is Nietzsche's conclusion about modem times. All is done purely with refere:nce: to self - and without horizons. This is the nihilism of modern times, a nihilism made: possibk by Socrate:s, and which now makes Socrates impossible . For this reason , there is no going back. If Nietzsche's command is to become who you are, the necessary implication is that one also is what one: has become. Such judgments are: at the basis of Nietzsche's occasionally almost pathetic protestations in Ecce Homo. He: is desperately afraid of being misunde:rstood precisely Dc=cause the abolition of the distinction of public and private virtue which this age rc=quires , renders possibk the dangerous and de:mocratizc=d de:velopme:nt of his doctrine: . Nie:rzsche can see for himself no alte:mativej if he: is to speak it must be in the most private of terms. Thus Zaratbustra is "a book for all and a book for none." There are no criteria that one: might have to me:et bc=fore: hearing it. (In Socrate:s there: were . Only those who could, would penetrate to the deeper Ic=vels of the dialogue , btl[ there was no danger in remaining, as does Protagoras, fairly near the surface.) But if Nietzsche speaks in the most private of terms, anyone who hears him will be able to think that he has understood him . The uses that can ensue are known.

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Socrates' private knowledge may well have been correct for Nietzsche. So much could only be established in a lengthy examination of the dialogues. But the public form that was its expression takes social and historical precedence and fina lly destroys the private content. One cannot simply talk as if there were a viable public realm . To do so would be to deny the intervening years of history; to stand at the end of a historical process is not the same as to stand at the beginning.

The New Komos

Nietzsche 's attitude toward Socrates then appears to be much the same as that of Aristophanes. 93 No matter what their agreement in private - and one might remember here that in the Symposium Aristophanes' speech is the only one not refuted by Socrates Aristophanes holds pubJically rha t the style of argumentation Socrates introduces has socially disruptive consequences and fails to weld a disintegrating culture back into a whole . Aristophanes' preferena= for the old style was already marked in Tbe Clouds. There he shows how "unjust argumem" - which is what Socrates teaches does, in fact, in all cases triumph over "just argument" by forcing the latter to adopt its poim of view. And, in Tbe Knights , the Euripidean Sausage-Seller wins by providing Demos with the comforts of everyday life and then rejuvenates him by boiling him in a large sausage kettle. The parody is ferocio us an d the poim clear; such a Dionysos is hard ly what Athens needs. Finally, in The Frogs, Aeschylus wins the poetry competition to see which dramatist has the most claim to the right to attempt to heal Athens . The contest is exceedingly close , but Dionysos, who first came to the underworld lured by his great love for Euripides, chooses the older playwright, because persuasiotJ, always Euripides' forte, must lose to more basic considerations of life and death. 94 Nietzsche, [00 , despite his attraction to Socrates, is compelled to choose with Aristophanes . Their position rests on the fundamental political judgment that the social consequences of the approach of Euripides-Socrates to the problems of Athens, and by ex tension for Nie tzsche , of Socratism for the present age, present flaws so great as to be not only unworkable but also self-destructive. Socrates and Euripides presuppose , in Nietzschct.'s understanding of

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them , that a healthy state can be founded on and by self-conscious men pursuing rationality in all their affairs. Nietzsche, as I read him, sees this not only as a task without rest, but worse, as an enterprise which , over time, generates the conditions of its own failure. The oldest Attic comedy and tragedy both end with a komos or marriage in which a unity, a new beginning and grounding , is established. 9.5 An end to what comes before is marked ; a renewed path can be pursued. The logic of $ocratism, however, is the constant pursuit of a goal that could never be satisfied. This starts the journey of the Western world to nihilism; to repeat it today is merely to further me process. The old foundation of the Greek culture and state had been mythological rather than rational. As Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, " the Greeks had felt involuntarily impelled to relate all of their experiences immediately to their myths .... Thus even the immediate present' had to appear to them right away sub specie aeterni and in a certain sense as rimeless."96 The last part of this quotation explains what Nietzsche means by " mythological. " The myths are constantly present in pre-Socratic Greek culture . They inform all actions and enable the Greeks to press upon their acts "the stamp of the eternal." Nietzsche judges the acceptance of myths be it in a culture or a person - as fundamentally analogous to the ability to accept the dramatic presentation as real. If the spectatorcitizen insists on "strict psychological causality " (as in fact Socrates had done), then the myth will not retain its power OYer him. Thus , Nietzsche writes toward the end of The Birth of Tragedy : withoul myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of creativilY; o nly a horizon defined by myths compleles and unifies a whole culrural movement. Myth alone saves all the powers of the imagination and of the apollonian dream from their aimless wanderings. The images of myth have lO be the unnoticed omnipresent demonic guardians under whose care the you ng soul gro ws, under whose sign man can interpret his life and struggles. Even the stare knows no more po werful unwritten laws than the mythical foundatio ns thai guarantee its connection with religion and its gro wth from mythological nOtions.91

It is important to note here that despite the romantic rhetoric, Nietzsche is making fundamentally the same epistemological point that he makes in his discussions of language or of the audiencetheater relationship . The myth is a consciously held illusion, held as

Chapter VII PARABLES OF THE SHEPHERD AND THE HERD: NIETZSCHE AND POLITICS The new development f or OU T uge cannOf be political fo r p olitics is II' dialectical relat io n btrwet!n the individual and the com m un ity in tbe reprt!snuative individual; b ut in our limes t he individual is in tbe process of becoming fa r too reflectivt: to be able to be satisfied w it h merely being represented

- S"rc:n Ki erk egaard, j ounla/s

The destiny of our times manifests itself in po/itical terms. - Thomas Mann, Nietzsche in the Light oi Our Experience

Conditions such as no utopians baw ever imagined will beco me possible. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Nacblass

Perhaps no opinion about Nietzsche has been so readily ac~p[ed as the claim that he was " anti-political. "

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out [his book , however, I have claimed that Nietzsche's understanding of contemporary times goes in fact in a " political" direction. He

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present age , the problem becomes one of dealing with the historical consequences and development of a society and an ethos founded on self-conscious rationalism. Since men have lived through twenty-four hundred years of such a society it is, for Nietzsche, impossible to deny that experience; somehow it too must be acknowledged and dealt with. Before approaching this task , there is much to do . The end of Gr~k culture was the beginning of Europe . I shall relate and conrrast the two . Only this may allow an understanding of what Nietzsche means by the human-all-too-human , and what doing away with it might signify.

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such, and about which one has no questions. To so hold an illusion allows the foundations of the time and culture to escape from the effects of the historical process, and become "eternal" The choice of word is significant. Eternal does not mean infinite in time , it means always present. It does not mean stretching backward and forward in time over an infinitely long path, but now and always. Thus, the mythological stamp put on the horizons of a culture keeps them from changing. This d()(s not hold the culture itself static, but makes it able to be changed only in terms of those horizons - if the proper artist is around . A resort to a comparison with Marx is helpful. A capitalist society, no matter how much it changes, is still a capitalist society because the capitalist panern of interaction (mode of production) remains. (That Marx finds succor and help in history is not relevant here . It merely means he uses a form of automation that Nietzsche , correctly I believe, rejects.) As long as Greek society is characterized by the illusion of those myths and can use them as criteria for understanding, the culture remains of the same "style." This is why the great danger that Euripides presents arises from his destruction of "illusion, " and the consequent impossibility of a continuing and recurring acceptance of the myths in a naive and affirming manner. Old Attic tragedy provides for Nietzsche the best example of the crafting of this acceptance. By successfully combining the natural and inS[inctual elements that had been so attractive in the Homeric world with the developed intellect that marks the tradition of the pre-Socraties, it joins instinct and consciousness in an artistic fusion the more astonishing for its success in recovering the myths for the polis. Euripides splits this union in favor of critical self-consciousness. (He worships, as AriS[ophanes points out, "gods of another metal, . . . his own stamp , newly struck.") By this fission , the ever present mythological basis of the polis fades in the chaos of the period of the Peloponnesian War. The ultimate consequence of his rationalism forces all men to be their own playwright, so to speak, since few accept anymore an unquestioned cosmic order. I shall detail the consequences of the growth of this individualism in the next chapter. Thus, in the end, "we must overcome even the Greeks."98 The teaching of eternal return , itself a new world of " conscious innocence," is given but little direction from Greek experience. For the

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thinks that the structures holding society and life together - what I have called the unq uestioned - have slowly broken down over the evolution of the West to such an extent that they are now only maintained by various moral , ep istemological, and political strongarm techniques. If they are to be replaced with new foundations, they will have to be shattered . This task, which Nietzsche sets for himself, can only be accomplished by breaking that which still holds cu lture together. Nietzsche is willing to risk all on the desperate gamble that, with proper preparation (this is why he writes), a transvaluation may be accomplished , once the genealogical chains of the past are definitely shattered, As such, the enterprise might be thought to be political ; through volition and domination it seeks to rep lace one form of existence by another. On the face of it, this opinion has suffered a bad fa te in the hands of Nietzsche commentators. Walter Kaufmann thinks Nietzsche to be everything except political. Martin Heidegger views Nietzsche's acco mplish ments as setting the stage for the end of Western thought ; in his eyes, Nietzsche's accomplishment lies fundamentally in the realm of ideas , not in the realm of life . The general prevalence of such judgments is probably due to the controversies generated by the abuse the Nazis made of Nietzsche's thought . They read him so thoroughly (and so inaccurately) as a foundation for their politics that most more recent commentators, desirous of being sympathetic to Nietzsche, have gone the other way and simply ignored any political dimensions his thought might have. This is encouraged because the location of his political thinking is no t precisely identifiable from chapter titles and book names. There are a few generally unknown but important writings dealing specifically with political questions. Cen tral among these is the early essay , Tbe Greek State. There are also pieces of major works which deal with present-day politi cal situations in a manner analogous to that with which Nietzsche deals with problems of morality, language, and the like. These are fo un d in short sections of Human, AJ/-Too-Human (" A Look at the State"), in several chapters in Zaratbustra , and in Beyond Good and Evil (" Peoples and Fatherlands," "The Natural History of Morals" ). There is secondly, and most importan tly, his analysis of the source and nature - the genealogy - of the present crisis of civilization. Nietzsche deals with this most specifically in The Genealogy of Morals and in the "We Scholars" section of

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Beyond Good and Evil. Finally, there are his political prescriptions and analyses of the future wh.ich are found most particularly in "Why I Am a Destiny" in Ecce Homo , in "What Is Noble " in Beyond Good and Evil, and in much of the vast and disparate material composing the NacbJass . Part of the Nacblass was made (by Nietzsche's executors) into the book known as Tbe Will to Power. To prevent misunderstandings, a few things should be noted . Due to a modem tendency to see the word "power" as designating "political power," there is a natural temptation to read Tbe will to Power as Nietzsche's description of the world he was trying to build. Suffice it to note here that since he repeatedly claimed "aU life is will to power ," the notion is at least so catholic as to make its application only to any particular state of affairs - past, present. or future - overly restrictive . There is also a temptation to view the book as somehow sequential to Thus Spoke Zaratbustra and therefore as a more "definite" statement of Nietzsche's thoughcs. In fact, of course, it comprises aphorisms drawn from his notebooks of the last decade of his life . Whatever the book can communicate as a whole is therefore necessarily comrade to the rest of his writings. An interpretation of all or even a part of Nietzsche's work resting mainly on a differentiation of The Will to Power from the rest of his work must be considered wrong. What, however, were Nietzsche's opinions about politics?2 There is no central text to which one might tum for a summary. Nietzsche's comments are as chaotic as the world they describe, though they do fall into two distinct categories: one dealing with the Greeks, the other with contemporary Europe . Nor is this accidental. If Nietzsche finds himself the "last of the anti-political Germans," he also knew and admired the pre-Socratic philosophers as "genuine statesmen"; if he counseled would-be philosophers to stay out of politics entirely in Bismarck's Gennany , he also recognized as monumental historical models both ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy - hardly periods devoid of politics. In times of philosophical statesmen such as Heraclitus and Empedocles, Nietzsche finds a unity of philosophy and politics. In modem times this union is dissolved ; in the present, Nietzsche fmds no "genuine philosophers" who are also "commanders and legislators."3 The most profound level of Nietzsche's political thought

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Arendt, life in the polis was characterized by traits which have to a large extent disappeared from modern life . Both writers wish to set off this sense of loss. Nietzsche is concerned then to attack the manner in which the Greek experience has been assimilated into the Western politica1 tradition and Western culrure. This assimilation is shaped by many things, in part by simple historical accident, in part by elements already specific to the tradition in the Golden Age, in part by the very pro~ss itself. All of these Nietzsche seeks to identify, the better to teach contemporary Europe the nature and direction of its loss. For this, no simple history , no matter how technically perfect, will ever be of use to any modem political philosopher. It would simply reproduce the Story, and will not " move on to action."s Nietzsche is not just holding up the Greeks as an example to modem times. Such a path seems to me to be the one chosen by Hannah Arendt , Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and occasiona1ly Sheldon Wolin. 6 Their approach is to some degree to keep alive the historical intellectual tradition in as much purity as possible. Strauss and Voegelin go back to the Greeks to get a "pure " approach to the problems of politics. Hannah Arendt finds lessons for the modern experience of the disintegration of authoriry. She envisages to some degree the same conditions arising again when authoriry disappears (immediately after the act of revolution for instan~) , as existed during Greek times. Nietzsche, on the other hand , does not hope to find real conditions in modern life which might correspond to those existing at the times of the Greeks; the burd~n of the history we bear is far too great for this to be possible. Rather, he hopes to create a bar of critical judgment: we will at least learn what we have to take into account. The tradition - glorious as it may be and certainly Nietzsche knew it as well or better than any of us - simply will no longer suffice. Twenry-four hundred years of experience have made it simply impossible to return to " purity .'" If this be true, one may well ask why the Greeks, rather than the Persians, or Egyptians, or Goths? The answer here is determined by the nature of Nietzsche's inquiry. If our understanding is ever to help us to proceed out of the situation we find ourselves in, it is necessary to return to the origin of European politics, the Greek polis. As the parent to most of the Western ways of thinking and speaking about things political it has a particular genealogical puriry. Thus it is of

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cannot th~n b~ concc=rn~d with th~ ~r~ction of syst~ms in th~ mann~r of classical political th~ory . Th~r~ can b~ no Nietzsch~an Contral SOcMJ, b~cause th~ unit of philosophy and politics (the "dominating philosophy") which would corr~spond to it d~s not (y~t) exist. Ni~tzsch~ rather will be concerned to investigate the reasons why it is no longer possible to live a political-philosophical form of life . Thus he will be only incid~ntally concern~d with sp~cific political happenings of his time. Such ignorancc= of them is willful. On th~ surfacc=, it would appear ridiculous to consider Wagner a more important political figure than Bismarck ; this valuation follows logically, though, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, from the deduction that sincc= there is no active governing principle of philosophical authority, present-day political happenings are at the most unimportant. On a d~~per level, as the first essay in the Genealogy makes clear , moral systems and politics are cod~termined. Sincc= the very ~xis­ tencc= of moral cat~gories d~pended on the d~sir~ to assert power over another group of people - and under slave morality to control and render th~m predictabl~ - all morality is fundamentally a form of politics. It is possible to understand Nietzsche's fulminations against modem politics in the same light as those against morality ; given the nihilistic nature of modem valuation systems, all attempts at asserting values , whether in morality or politics, must, of necessity, encourage the onslaught of nihilism. A short reflection of the consequencc=s of the modem mixture of morality and politics and the ensuing ideological conflicts should give one pause before condemning Nietzsche's attack on morality. He is saying that the fact which mak~s modem politics so dangerous is precisely that morality and politics are of necc=ssity tied. As Andre Malraux has recc=ntly pointed out, Nietzsche understood far better than anyone else that the twentieth cc=ntury would be the century of great ideological wars. Tb e Uses of History

It is not accurate to say that Nietzsche's vision of things Greek is essential to his understanding of the present. This puts the historical cart before the horse. As has to be true in any genealogical analysis, it is his view of things modern which is important for his understanding of things Greek . Thus, to answer Nietzsche's account of Greece in

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the period from the Cleisthenian reforms to the Peloponnesian War with the commem that this is simply " not how it was," misses the poim ; Nietzsche holds his analysis of things Greek justified and correct insofar as it depicts what is important in the development of that period for contemporary times. The question Nietzsche asks of Greece is not precisely " What happened? " but rather, "What is living of that time?" In a preliminary fashion , for instance , there is a more familiar approach in the portrait that Max Weber draws of Benjamin Franklin in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capita/ism . For Weber, Franklin becomes the type of the early protestant and capitalist. He is constantly deferring gratification , always worrying about consequences, incapable of living in the present. To such an etching, a historian might object that Franklin had , after all , thirteen illegitimate children , and was, while in Paris at !east, a notorious lecher and bon viva"t . Such hardly constitutes ascetic behavior. True , of course . But that Franklin had uncounred bastardy or was attracted to the belles dames of Paris is not of significance to those who are inrerested in understanding capitalism. If capitalism is, as Max Weber thought it ro be, a central fact of all our existence now, then the facts about Franklin just referred to constitute part of what Marx once designated the "ash heap of history." As Weber with Franklin, so also Nietzsche with the Greeks. If one wishes to quarrel with what Weber found important to see in Franklin , one would also have to quarrel with his interpretation of the significance of capitalism. Assuming that Nietzsche has done his work properly, if one wishes to quarrel with his underS[anding of the Greeks , one will have to first attack his analysis of the presenr . From his analysis of things Greek, Nietzsche extracts what William Arrowsmith refers to as a " unified field theory," by which to judge the chaos of present-day Europe. Hannah Arendt has repeatedly urged upon her readers the notion that politics have changed since Greek times.4 The perception is also Nietzsche 's and, as such , not in itself particularly inreresting. But what is generally not noted in her analysis is also that which is at the basis of the usual accusation that Nietzsche is anti-political. Both judgments fail ro see that both her and Nietzsche's positions hold that something essential has been lost in the experience of politics from the times of the Greeks to the present. It is not JUSt that politics have changed ; for Nietzsche, as for

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particular importance since the coming age is to be that of "great politics," concerned with Europe, and eventually the world as a whole. Grec=ce is of particular genealogical relevance for this new development since it relates to that which is properly European, not that which is French , Italian, German, etc. If Niensche were seeking to understand something about German politics, Greece would be of far less use to him ; but if one is to be European , "What were the Greeks?" must be answered. He is not interested in Greece except as it speaks to Europe. Finally, instead of stressing the similarities, potential , actual, or imagined , between this world and that of the Greeks, Nietzsche is concerned to show the differences, the lack of relation between our present world and politics and those of Attic Greece.8 Throughout his life Nietzsche learned from, fought with, and expounded the Greeks. But to think that they provide historical lessons for modem practice is to mistake a historical lesson for the genealogical. No more than Tocqueville thought that America was a pattern France might follow , does Nietzsche think Greece was one modern Europe should emulate. Tb e Genealogy of Greek Politics; The Polis and the Importance of Political Space As one of the first to see through the nation of a Greece of ".nveetness and light" to that of a dark and masked underworld, Nietzsche understands things Greek {O contain an affirmation both of the serenity and also of that which is terrible. In no fashion will Nietzsche ever downplay the violent and awful aspects of Greek politics: he thinks that the power and strength of the civiliution rested to some considerable degree on this violence. Nietzsche 's vision of the healthy and violent politics of the polis cannot be comprehended without an understan~ing of the arena in which they took place. For him, Greek politics is an activity engaged in by those who are liberated from the world of private necessity. 9 Political men thus are not under a constraint to use politics for their own private ends. In fact , since they have escaped from the realm of necessity, they are under very few constraints of prudence. Except for certain unconscious preconditions (to be dealt with below),

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political men are basically free to express their non-necessary drives and ambitions in an arena with other people doing the same. They did so. I mentioned above, in an arena. The particular relation of the political Greek to his polis is of prime importance. This relation forms the "horizon" that Nietzsche notes in an early essay as prerequisite for life and culture. "This is a universal law: a living thing can only be healthy and srrong and productive inside a horizon . If it is unable to draw a horizon around itself. and too selfish to lose its own view in another's. it will come to an untimely end. Cheerfulness. a good conscience, belief in the future . the joyful deed - all depend in the individual, as in a people, on there being a line that sets off the surveyable I Ubersebbar) , the clear from the unilluminated and dark ." 10 As Hannah Arendt has pointed OUt, " the polis ... is not the city state in its physical location ; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together for this purpose. No matter where they happen to be ... action and space create ... the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely the place where I can appear to others as they appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living and inanimate things, but make their appearance explicitly." It Nietzsche brings out the particular relationship that the Greek has to his city. The citizen existed in the city-state, but not for it , an experience repeated in healthy aristocracies where, for Nietzsche, the "essential characteristic ... [is] that it experiences itself not as a function (whether of monarchy or commonwealth) but as their meaning and highest justification .... (The] fundamental faith simply has to be that society must not exist for society's sake, but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task .... " 12 For such an unquestioned and unquestioning stance to be possible. the language and mode of thought has to be highly imegrated with the social institution of polis. Without sharing J. P. Vernant 's attempt to minimize the difference between pre-Socratic and Socratic thought, Nietzsche would agree that "the birth of the polis and of philosophy are so tightly linked that rational thought must appear from its origins to be solidary with the social and mental srructures that are proper to the Greek city .... " Aristotle, in ·defining man as "a political animal ," underlined that which separates Greek reason from that of today. and accordingly Vemant continues: " if homo

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sapiens is ... a homo politicus, it is that reason itself is essentially political." IJ In the polis, therefore, there arises an extraordinary preeminence of speech over all other instruments of power. It remains the " daughter of the ciry" until. in Nietzsche's eyes, the actions and teaching of Socrates loosen the organic relation . This autochthonian rdation of language and politics marks for Nietzsche the extraordinary distance that separates modern man from the Greek . The very characteristic of a "strong" group of men is their ability (Q name things for their own life . In such a use of language as a political instrument - allxit nonreflectively - Nietzsche sees the strength of this sociery . 14In the best of Greek times , the state is thus the arena where people compete, both physically as in the games, and, more importantly, publically through argument. Politics never is a tool that one uses to compete, nor is language (or, more properly, rhetoric) a skill that one learns from someone else in order to win battles . As we have seen, according to Nietzsche , Socrates "holds virtue to be teachable." IS The basis of Nietzsche's whole attack against Socrates and Euripides is that they make language (and virtue) into something which can be learned and taught by almost anyone. The pre-Socratic conception exemplifies a " healthy" relation between men and politics. Nietzsche sees the state as an apollonian scrim on which dangerous dionysian understandings are transvalued into culture or, as shall be gone into below, exteriorized into warfare . For Nietzsche , then, the most important Greek political institution will be the agon - contest - in which the chaos lurking in desire for domination and in domination itself is refracted in a healthy manner, such that political stability and continuity - the prerequisite for culture - be ensured. 16 In the ongoing agon , no one person can become the best and thus be able to determine by himself the categories of conf1jct. It is in this light that one should understand the passage laudatory of Plato in the early essay, Homer's Co1ltest, where Nietzsche has Plato compare his achievements favorable to the best that others have done only to disavow them ; thus also Nietzsche 's curious approval of ostracism: by preventing the best man from emerging, it helps the health of the state . As we saw in Chapter VI, for Nietzsche Socrates destroys the agon . For Nietzsche. the Greeks are " a priori ' politi cal men in themselves' and ... history knows no second example of such a frightful

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un leasing of political instincts... . This bloody jealousy of city to ciey, of party to parey, the murderous greed of each little state .... Whither does the naive barbarism of the Greek state point? What is its excuse before the tribunal? by the hand it leads a flowering woman, Greek society." 17 What is important about and makes possible the occasionally awful political ex uberance of the Greeks is this: the Greek state and politics does not exist for itself, the state is not its own justification. It is, rather, the arena in which people compete and out of which higher culture and individuals emerge . It is a delicate situation and will persist as long as no contestant is able (has the language and epistemological position) to identify himself with the whole arena. rf someone could look down on the arena , he would be in a commanding position. He can , so to speak, make the categories and thus will enjoy a different relation of consciousness to them than do the other players. As long as the genealogical parentage of the state is hidden behind what Nietzsche refers to as the "veil of Isis," culture will flourish. The role of strong politics for Nietzsche is thus to hide from consciousness the genealogical foundations of the state.

The Institutionalization of Political Space

Along with the need for strong politics at the foundation of the state goes a requirement for continuity. Indeed, this is only natural ; no matter how firm the foundations , without duration no culture can evolve. Nietzsche lays heavy stress on this necessity, to the point in fact of insisting that fathers without sons be denied full civic rights. " In the natural bellum omflCS contra omnes society IGescllschaftl can not strike root on a scale larger than and beyond the reach of the family . ... " Instead of the constant struggle necessary for survival in pre-political times , the state (at least the Greek state) concentrates

outbursts SO that , if perhaps more violent, they allow "in the pauses. .. for society , under the effect of that war now turned inward and compressed . .. Ito growl and flourish, so that when there come warmer days, the shining blossoms of genius may show forth ." 18 In Nietzsche 's understanding, if the state is to be healthy, it must fundamentally and always be a communal insti tution, eine Organism us. It is not a simple collection of strong individuals, as

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Julius Binder argues; 19 no individual muS{ feel himself outside of the polis and capable of using it to his own ends. He may have other ends - the "culture" Nietzsche wants is a form of psychological health - but inside the political space of the state, politics happen, they are not used. Such a happy situation was maincained precariously throughout a period of Greek history by men who were artists, philosophers, and statesmen ; as we have seen, the pre-Socraries and the early tragedians are of the same cloth for Nietzsche . Nietzsche understands the Oresteia as a dramatic trilogy about social and political problems of changes in moral consciousness. The cycle of plays ends with an integration of the two conflicting moral and episremological views in a society thac retains the integration necessary for communaJ health . In another instance mentioned by Nietzsche, ThaJes, recognizing the dangerous disintegrative potentialities in the proliferation of the polis, attempts a cultural unification of Greece by means of a political confederation. zo His failure, as will be shown below, was of capital importance. In any case, this delicate ongoing Aufbebung can only be maintained through the efforts of men like Thales and Empedocles - "genuine statesmen," as Nietzsche calls them . Without this continuing artistic effort, however, a number of antagonistic contradictions implicit in the notion of continuity take over. Like all organized political power, the polis wants to maintain social and political configurations as they are . Such stasis is hostile to the ongoing development of Bi/dung. In plays like the Oresteia and Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus resolves this problem. But, without the continual rebirth that the lauter Staatsm(inner provide, the state, as the apollonian d ement of the culture, 21 constantly attempts to assert dominance over the dionysian progenitor it is supposed to refract into culture. To the degree that the state succeeds, it selects a number of affects " through which the regularity of performance would be guaranteed .... " The apollonian characteristics of the state constitute a denial of the necessity of change . More immediately, the state attempts to develop principles whereby some men in the state will begin to find agreeable that which is in fact disagreeable . The state generates then what we might today call a " false consciousness," " that one should like to do disagreeable things." 22 In fact , Nietzsche writes that the

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necessity for continuity gives rise: to a class structure; there develop two classes, one of "compulsory labor and one of free labor. " The organized power relationship between the two is " the strongest typical relation after the pattern of which other relationships are unconsciously form ed. " As this relationship becomes the central focus of the state, problems immediately arise. 23 There occurs rapidly a transformation structurally parallel and analogous to those diagnosed in The Genea/ogy of Mora/s . The lower classes should have no reason to love the state. However, in relation to the ruling class, they are weak and suffer, and so seek justification for what has happened to them. To accomplish this they begin to identify with the force which is hostile to them. "Just as if a magic will emanate from them [the conquerors1 , the weaker forces at· tached themselves with mysterious speed, changing wonderfully un· dec the influence of the sudden swelling of that power-avalanche under the charm of that creative kernel. ... " 24 Such an attachment is the very basis of ressentiment . The lack of a dominating will on the part of the weak leads them to tie themselves psychically to the strong. Psychologically , this compensation is at the source of the genealogy of slave morality ; socially, it has important consequences. Such a development in the state allows an evasion of responsibility by those who identify in this negative fashion . In slave morality , men behave not as individuals but as parts; so also through the division of labor, the state now makes men do things contrary to their nature. The " huge machinery of the stare quells the individual , so that he declines responsibility for that which he does . . .. Everything that a man does in service .o f the state he does against his own nature." 25 The necessary organization of a state makes people different " by the division of responsibility , of command and execution through the intervention of the virtues of obedience, duty , patriotism [Vaterlandes/iebesJ . .. ." The state represents on a social level epistemological changes characterized by the separation of will from action, of cause from effect, and so forth. 26 Social organization and the state in particular thus generate in many people the behavior associated with slave morality . As time progresses, this tends to affect all the people . Social organization is for Nietzsche consonant with morality and makes possible and aco=ptable severe distinctions of power in society.

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The Division of Labor a"d the Direction of Ressentiment

The division of labor is the main tool thar the institutionalized state uses to ensure that its members act as parts and not as complete human beings. It is " the principle of barbarians .. . . There are not divisible entities in an organism." Under the impact of the division of labor, the political space of the agora which made the agon possible rapidly begins to disintegrate. The individual person is encouraged to be personally irresponsible for his actions. Like a Euripidean character, he can blame his actions on powers outside of himself. He can now act for the state activity since the political world is becoming a mechanism distinguishable from the individuals who compose it. (He can, of course, also not act for the state - the existence of the choice imp lied in the consciousness of "for" is the problem.) "Everything he learns in service of the state," says Nietzsche, " is ob tained through the division of labor." 27 Through the division of labor the state fosters "imperfect but more useful individuals." For the first time. ind ividuals can be considered in terms of their utility. It will be a short step to a consideration of the state itself as a source of useful power. In a division of labor society, Nietzsche writes, men are "inverse cripples" - one part of their skills becomes so magnified that, in their essence, they become that part. The portion of their being that is not being "used" by the society is so alienated that, in Nietzsche's image, one needs a " magnifying glass" to vindicate the humanity of these " human beings who are nothing but a big eye, or a big mouth , or anyth ing that is big." 28 In th e midst of such structural changes in the Greek state, there intervenes a set of historical events which speed up the development of the division of labor and the slavely moral sta te. The agonistic development of culture is premised on the basis that no one person or state was in fact the " best. " ForemoSf in this practice of politics is, as noted above , the encompassi ng political space that prevents people from standing outside the political myth and using the state to their own private ends. Nietzsche sees the victory the Athenians win in the Persian wars as the source of a most important change in orientation. The wars appear as a daemon ex macbina, and put an end to Greek politica l conflict. 29 The danger to the very existence

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and definition of the state is so great and the Athenian victory so complete that Athens becomes convinced that political strength and predomin an~ is the only thing they can rely on to maintain their supremacy and security. Out of thc victory over the Persians , Athens develops a new attitude toward politics. In the fragments lVissen· schalt und Weisheit in Kampfe, Nietzsche writes; "the spiritual domination of Athens hindered all reformation . One must think back to the period when this domination was not present ; it was not necessary; it came first on the heels of the victory over the Persians, that is when it became a matter of physical power." After this, even Aeschylus is too late to work anything but a holding action, and other refonning attempts such as those of Empedodes are kept from fruition by the developmem of Socratic epistemology. When all of this becomes firmly established, it brings about " the foul theory that one could only anend to culture when armed to the teeth and wearing boxing gloves." Even Thucydides, Nietzsche notes sorrowfully , exhibits this rrait by his belief that without the state men will tear each other apar[. 30 This combination of natural development and historical accident moves politics away from being an activity that gi\'es rise [0 a healthy polis to being an end in itself. Such objectification - parallel to and manifest in the Socratic revolution in epistemology - is a general disaster for all of Greek culture . The predominance of Athens is so total, that no external enemies remain on whom to fashion the aggressions that the inner comradiction of the state releases. Much as Freud was to point out later, when external object cathexis is impossible, libidinal aggression is turned inward and results in neuroses and psychoses. 31 It is most important to keep in mind here a general point about Nietzsche. The evolution of the Greek polis (or any emiry) follows a certain ontological pattern , but is by no means inevitable from its vcry beginning. At a key moment, the Persian wars give a different impetus and qualitatively change the structural foundations of the Greek world. The importance of the specific historical occurrence shows that Nietzsche, contrary to Hegel, th inks that concrete human action can be of prime importance in the course of human events. If such a realization opens a door of histori cal possibilities, it also withdraws from the historical process any notion of a dialectical logic leading inevitab ly to a differem social condition. If things are to

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become diffe~nt , then men wiU have to do it themselves (whatever that implies is, of course, not clear). The disastrous objectification of the state has far-reaching consequences for later political and social evolution . As the state becomes rransformed from the arellQ of power into the instrument of power. a new kind of men arise to make usc of this tool. Armed with Socratic absrractions and self-consciousness, they stand essentially outside the moral horizon of the community. Since most people who remain in the community necessarily forget the origin of their moral sentiments and get caught up in the inertia of their unexamined beliefs, those who possess self-consciousness can begin to manipulate the state for their own private ends and will identify with it only insofar as it serves and corresponds to their own instincts. " In considering the political world of the Hellenes, I will not bide tbose developments of tbe present wbicb I fear dangerous atropbies of tbe political spbere. If there should exist men who through birth, as it were , should be placed outside the cultural [VolksJ and state instinct ... then such men will find their ultimate political aim to be the most peaceful coexistence possible of large communities, in which they will be permitted their own purpose without resistance." J2 Such men tend to destroy politics. It is clear that Nietzsche fmds fault in them . In modem times, for instance, Nietzsche might admire Bismarck early in his life when he still thought an educational rejuvenation of German culture possible, but he rapidly comes to perceive Bismarck as a new Alcibiades. His appreciation for Bismarck and Alcibiades is for their skill; never does he indicate that they had any role comparable to those reserved for the great Greek tragedians and the potentiality of Panhellenic culture. This is why Wagner and his new "international culture " is, despite his lapses into nationalism, a more important figure for Nietzsche . Much like Thucydides, Nietzsche thinks both Pericles and Cleon had many faults as leaders, but truly responsible for the downfall of Athens is the stateless man, Alcibiades, who uses the state to his own end. l3 For the state to be used, it has to be made calculable. To risk its destruction in war would be dangerous . Thus, in modem times, the promulgation of the doctrines of the "liberal optimistic" viewpoint have tended to take the antagonistic quality out of war. The conscious competitive war is replaced with the mass movement , particularly susceptible to ideological manipulation . 14 When this devel-

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opment combines with the lack of responsibility also engendered by such a state, the dangers become tremendous. Contrary to those who see in modem times the happy development of the autonomous individual, Nietzsche finds modem man to be not a " personality , but merely an isolate {Einzelnl. He represents all atoms against the communality .... He instinctively sets himself up with other atoms; what he fights , he fights not as a personality but as the representative of atoms against the whole." Already in Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche notes that we " live in a pedod of atomistic chaos." 3S As with all slave morality, the trend toward fragmentation is fostered by the desire to become like the strong. Such a person , though, is " weak and [anl extremely vulnerable piece of vanity and demands that everyone should be made equal : that everyone should only stand inter pares . ... " 36 This might possibly allow some petty vanities to be assuaged - in a civilized age almost everyone has some modicum of talent - but the basis of culrure must necessarily perish. For everyone to become equal means to Nietzsche for everyone to become individualistically oriented toward his private gains, and thus in the totality of his being to be equally subject to the realm of necessity . 80th of these are incompatible with the root of the agonistic prerequisite for culture and politics. The consequence of the long development of the slavely moral state is quite clear for Nietzsche. There is a progressive lessening of politics. "The democratic movement is not only a fonn of the decay of political organization, but a form of the decay , namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value ... 37 This is not the position of a man who is "against" politics, but rather of onc= who is against the human consequencc=s of what we now call politics. The progressive evolution of the Greek political experience can be summc=d up as follows. 1. Culture depends on the existence of strong and agonistic politics. 2. Such politics depend on the existencr of thc= statc=. 3. The state progressivdy tc=nds to depend on slave morality for its c=xistc=ncr. 4. The combination of slave morality and politics inevitably Ic=ads to a democratization of relations bc=twec=n classes and a decline of the agon.

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S. The maintenance of institutions thus requires the growth of individualism. 6. Democratization and individualism make culture possible. 7. This tends to funher erode the possibility of strong politics. 8. The outcome is thus characterized by the absence of politics and of the public sense.

Such a sketch is an oudine of the grandeur and decline of Athens. It is also meant, of course, to be a general sketch of any political relationship ; as genealogy, it contains lessons for any limited time span . From his examination of the Gr~k state, Nietzsche has developed a position which will allow him to examine the genealogy of modern politics also.

Modern Politics: Its Genealogical Prospects

No point has been made more often than that NietzSche has no coherent doctrine of modern politics. By this is generally meant that he provides no political program, no comprehensive political analysis. Yet, for Nietzsche, this is as it should be. As I mentioned above, like the politics of his day, Nietzsche's political opinions are in fragments. This as we now see must be so ; there is simply for Nietzsche no coherent way to talk about politics of his day because - in genealogical perspective - the politics tend to be incoherent. Phenomenological description must remain atomistic, because of the absence of any unifying arena in which politics occur and out of which new men and culture might arise. The one attempt Nietzsche makes at providing a unified perspective explicitly on politics is probably the long section "On Peoples and Fatherlands" in Beyond Good and Evil. And yet this, to our confusion , is essentially a discussion of music. For a modern man the reason remains obscure, even if a note from the period of The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music reminds us that "modern men hold themselves toward music in the way that the Greeks did toward their symbolic myths. " Nonetheless, it is possible to work out bOUl modern political phenomena manifest the genealogy that the Greeks formed and passed on .

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Nationalism, tbe Ascetic Priest of Politics The above developments describe a change in the relationship of the individual to the state. In a long section of Human, AI/-Too-H uman entitled "Religion and Government," Nietzsche analyzes this change. As long as religion and po litics are joined in the symbiotic unity typical of the polis, religion provides " an attitude of tranquillity, and temporizing and confidence" duri ng the inevitable crises that arose . Its antiquarian functio n ensures the continuity of the polis. Such a religion, however, inevitably has an authoritarian and hierarchical basis and survives only with difficul ty when equalitarian ideals spread . "When the state is no longer allowed to draw any use from religion or the people t hink roo di versely on religious matters for the government to be able to adopt a consistent and uniform procedure with respect to them - the way out of the difficulty will necessarily present itself to treat religion as a private affair and leave it to the responsibility of each individual conscience and custom.,,38 The develop ment of individualism breaks up the original unity of the polis. Christianity encourages t his separation with the concept of "render untO Caesar" and is destruct.ive of the unity of society . An immense number of sects are generated , which culminate in the hostility of the religious, and the overattachmem of the irreligious, to the state. Nietzsche refers to "p rimitive religion as the abolition of the state ... . " 38 No matter who wins in these struggles, be it the religious through a form of more or less enlightened despotism, or the irreligious thro ugh education and schools, it makes, in the end, little difference . Reverence for the state is destroyed, " the utilitarian attitude is encouraged." Scrawled on the back of an envelope he received from Overbeck in March , 1878, Nietzsche notes that " the decay of the religion is also the decay of the state." 40 The separation of the this-worldly state from the other-worldly religion that Christianity fosters is thus one of the main aspects of the Ch ristian religion that Nietzsche rejects. He puns on t heir relation by linking Christ und Anarchist (Christian and anarchist). For Nietzsche, Christianity is explicitly a possible life, but only "as t he most private fonn of existence : it presupposes a narrow, remote, completely unpolitical society . ... " The impossibility in the present day and age of combining Christianity and any public sense is underlined

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most strikingly in Zaratbustra . The first person Zarathustra meets is a pious hermit. Zarathustra does not tell him that God is dead. 41 The social message is clear; as with Socratism, implicit in Christianity and ics liberal offshoots are elements that make society and the public weal impossible. Its epistemology endlessly destroys the horizons that make all culture and life possible. This is Nietzsche in a very Burkean mode . Since illusion is necessary to all culture, if the Apollonian scrim is torn aside, all is lost. Almost echoing Burke's notion of the " politic-well-wrought-veil" Nietzsche argues that "if religion disappears the state will inevitably loose: its old veil of Isis and will no longer arouse: veneration ." Continuity, the necessary prerequisite for a strong culture , becomes impossible since people shy away from tasks that are not privately rewarding in the utilitarian S(:nS(:. 42 The disintegration of the public and political continues on . Men ariS(: who stand psychically outside the state, which, in turn , becomes merely the "ruling arm" of this class of people - mainly financiers, according to Nietzsche . "In the end - one can say it with certainty - the doubting of all government and the insight infO the useless and harassing nature of those: shon-winded struggles (between religion and the state] must drive men to an entirely new resolution, to the abrogation of the concept of the state and the abolition of the contrast 'public and private.' Private concerns gradually absorb the business of me state." 4J In Nietzsche's analysis, then , the public disappears, and strong politics is no longer possible. Though such a development constitutes the decay of the state, it leads an individual no more than does slave morality lead him to total annihilation. The decaying state resists disintegration through natjonalism, which Nietzsche sees essentially as a reactionary movement since, as the characteristic form of modern politics, " this arrogant conceit" focuses the int~rests of the individual on entities that prevent (much as Bismarck comes to) the cultural unity of Europe . The gradual development in Europe of a "supranational and nomadic type of man" possessing great powers of adaption - the "evolving European" - receives great setbacks due to nationalism. In the end , though, this attempt will have exacdy the same ironic reversal as socialism and anarchism ; it will continue to encourage the festering modern state, and prevent man's attention from focusing on that which now unites men , the fact that they are European .

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Nietzsche is not saying so much that nations and lor modem political entities arc in themselves evil, but that they now consist of evil sets of perceptions about the processes that are going on in the world. Nationalism allows people to avoid coming to tenns for awhile with the gradual disintegration of meaning - what Nietzsche formulated in the aphorism of the "death of God." It provides an artificial and " overly modest" meaning for life. It is thereby an epistemological disaster logically analogous to the " innocent" and "guilty means" that the ascetic priest uses to maintain moral life for the individual and to the pity that keeps Zarathustra ,from eternal return . The nationalistic state wants to be alI, but provides only a very low-level fonn of association. 44 Thus, in Zaratbustra, the nationalistic state is the " new idol," the "coldest of cold monsters" because it follows and is, in fact , made possible and encouraged by the death of God. "The monster . .. detects you too, you vanquishers of the old God .... Your weariness serves the old idol." 4$ Previously nihilism triumphs in the name of a slavely moral religiosity ; now it triumphs under the banner of man . Nietzsche sees as dangerously false the supposition dear to Kant and nineteenth-century liberals that once republicanism is freed from the fetters of feudal religiosity, healthy states will spring forth. In unmasking them, his intention is to point out exactly how little the psychological foundations of the state have changed in the last millennia. The transition to democratic rule merely encourages - to some degree even speeds up --- processes that were already ontologically implied in the foundations of contemporary politics. With the death of God , all falls into the decay of the modern state. For now, "accepting the belief that God has passed away, to the question 'Who commands?' my answer is, 'The herd commands.''' The state is the "coldest of the cold monsters" because there is no creating will behind it , no public arena except the shadow of a dead God; no value framework can be provided . "Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth : 'I, the state , am the people.' That is a lie! It was creators that created people and hung a faith and a love over them : thus they served life. It is annihilators who set traps for the many and call them 'state.' " Through such reification. the state is the "slow suicide of life." 46 Ultimately, for Nietzsche. the modern state fails in that, by democratization and nationalism, it drains the potential sources from

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which creation of new values could come. Thus, for instance, of justice: "The 'state ' as administraror of justice is a piece of cowardice because the great man by whom standards can be set is missing. " 47 There is no ruling class. At the most there is a shepherd - a person whose total identity emanates from the herd that he leads. The creative "class" of today has, in Nietzsche 's understanding, disappeared beneath the relentless logic of concomitant moral and epistemological genealogical developments. Such an ongoing democratization of social relationships implies a society where "everyone feels he has a right to every problem " and where "everyone may sit in judgment on everyone else ." Such a situation is a denial of that political space that Nietzsche feels necessary to strong politics. In Greece. only certain people could sit in judgment on others - those who had access ro the same agora. Men with other political mordities had no commensurable rights. Thus for Nietzsche , justice demands that " what is fair for one cannot by any means - for that reason alone - also be fair for others." 48 If everyone can judge anyone, there is no order or rank , no definition of alike and different. neither friends nor enemies, no agon and consequently no culture. One might object , as does Henri Lefebvre, that socialism is a modem reaction against the individualizing tendency of the slave morality state. 49 Nietzsche , however, considers this possibility. As the relation of individuals to each other becomes more and more aromistic - as the sense of the " public" diminishes - rationalistic comparisons between people arise . This is the birth of the notion of equal rights, a notion that develops narurally and appropriately in a society operating on such premises. In The Gay Science , Nietzsche notes that " the commonest man feels that nobility is not to be improvised and that it is his part to honor it as the fruit of an extended culture . But the absence of superior presence , and the notorious vulgarity of manufacturers with red , fat hands, brings up the thought to him that it is only chance and fortune that has elevated the one above the other ; well then, he reasons to himself, let us in our tum tempt fortune and chance. Let us in our tum throw the dice - and socialism commences." so It is important to note three things about this analysis of socialism. Firstly , though Nietzsche thinks of socialism as in part a reac· tion to the over-atomization of society , he does not think of it as

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something qualitatively different . Socialism is merely the logical continuation of political developments characteristic of any society and of the western world in general since the Peioponnesian War. He notes: "Socialism .. . grasps that, to attain anything one must organize oneself to a collective action . to a ' power.''' But what it desires is not "society as the purpose IZweck 1 of the isolate [Einzelnl , but rather society as the means of making possible many isolates - this is the instinct of socialists about which they frequently deceive themselves . . .. " 51 Socialism is the logical continuation of slave morality. AJI attempts, such as socialism, to cure the ills of society by reforming institutions are bound to fail , fo r they will be subject to the same genealogical ontology. Secondly, it is a mistake to think that what Nietzsche is calling for is merely some aristocracy of noble producers. In the notes for Human, All-Too-Human he observes: "When a lower worker says to a rich manufacturer 'you do not deserve your happiness' he is right ; how(ver, his conclusions from that are false . No one deserves his happiness, no one his unhappiness." S2 In other words, in modem societies, all attem pts at moral valuation are simply ideologi cal falsifi· cations designed to justify a self-serving position. It is incon ceivable for Nietzsche, that there be a group of men with power, such as capi talists, who would ever be entitled to their position. They must share in the decadence that characterizes the whole . 53 Nietzsche does not want to place "hoble" men at the head of this system. Lastly, Nietzsche sees contradictory elements in socialism. It is progressive in the sense that it furt hers and hastens the tendencies toward leveling which must be accomplished before significant change might become possible. (A Marxist would say that one must "sharpen the contradictions.") Socialism thus "maintains lunterhaltJ men and brings to the lower classes a sort of practical-philosophical language. Thus far it is a source of strength of the spirit (Kraf'quelle des Geistes l ." 54 Despite this progressive tendency, there is also a reactionary strand in socialism. In the modern democratic state, Nietzsche sees, as did TocquevilJe and Saint-Simon, a concentration of power patterned on that of despotism and increased exponentially by the concomi tant social-atomizing tendency. Socialism is the "fantastic younger brother of the decrepit despo tism which it wants to bury ; its efforts

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are thus in the deepest sense reactionary. It demands a fullness of state powet, such as only despotism has had .... It wants the caesaristic power-state of this century, for it . . . wishes to be its suC(rssor . ... " 55 Generally , two points stand out in Nietzsche 's analysis of contemporary politics. Firstly, tbe modern state represents the concretization only of slave morality. "Where are the masters for whom [mday 's} slaves work?" One must not always expect the simultaneous appearance of the two complementary classes of society. The modem state manifests the disbelief in the possibility of great men, and " at the bottom we are all herd and mob." SIS Secondly, tbe nature of modern nationalism is to keep political life at a very low level. The "innocent means" which the ascetic priests have at their disposal probably correspond to elections, national holidays, etc. The "guilty means" - the "orgies of feeling" - we will examine below under "great politics." To assert that Nietzsche attacks politics is to miss the key point . Tbis is not a specifically a'lti-politicai doctrine. Nietzsche is the last of " the anti-political Germans," because he is opposed to what Genllans call " politics." Germany manifests in its politics the same sickness it manifests in the rest of its society. Nietzsche sees the main characteristic of the modem situation as a nationalistic state in which people have little or no political relationship to the power concretized in the state. Most developments - even socialism - tend to further this power.

Tbe Politics of Entr-acte

Nationalism is, as pointed out before, essentially a resisting force . It does not want to return to something atavistic, but wants to stabilize the onrushing nihilism . "Owing to the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationalism has induced. and still induces, among the peoples of Europe ; owing also to the shortsighted and quick-handed politicians who are at the mp today with the help of this insanity .. . owing to all this and much more that today simply cannot be said , the most unequivocal portents are now overlooked , or arbitrarily and mendaciously interpreted - that Europe wants to become one." 57 For Nietzsche, the increased cultural, commercial,

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and nomadic (with decreases in landholding) contacts bt:tween peo· pies should lead to the ultimate destruction of nationalities; at present, however, narionalism causes the isolation of countries from each other. This is what Nietzsche calls a kunstlicbe Nationalism us an artificial nationalism, artificial and temporary bt:cause it works counter to [hose forces that he sees unifying Europe, such as democratization. It requires " anifi~, lying , force to maintain its reputations." S8 It is temporary precisely because it is artificial. Its existence will depend on the continuing presence of the artificers - the commercial and social classes in whose interest such a situation is maintained . On this topic, Nietzsche engages in an almost "Marxian" analysis of the basis of balan~ of power politics such as Europe knew in the middle of the last ~ntury . As in Gree~ , there evolve men without state instinct (possibly parodies of AJcibiades) as well as a system of large equipoised states. Nietzsche discusses this in what might appear an aeypical fashion . Behind this development , he sees "truly international homeless hermits," who, due to their lack of " state instinct," abuse politics as an apparatus for their own enrichment. If therefore I designate as t he most dangerous cbaracteristic of tbe political present the .appliClltion of revolutionary thought to the service of .a selrrsb stateless gold-aristocf.acy ~ if I conceive of the enormous disscmin.ation of liberal optimism as the result of modem financial affairs fallen into stf.ange hands, and if I imagine all evils of social conditions togetber witb tbe necessary decay of tbe arts to hlllJe eitber germinaud from that ro ot or grown together .alo ng with it, one will have to pardon my occasionall y chanting a paean on war.S9

It is obvious that Nietzsche is disturlxd by the existence of men who have no loyalty to any group or rank order. Such men would seem to represent the ultimate logical development of the position that Socrates occupied vis-a-vis Athenian society. But they cannot propose a morality of any kind ; they are only ultimate nihilistic epigones of the great Athenian. It does not appear that Nietzsche ever followed up such considerations, though he is saying something important . Nationalism seems to be a direct result of social democratization. He sees a siruarion in which people whose loyaley is only to money manipulate such nationalisric feeling for [heir own ends. Such men have no political, only economic loyaley . This is, in fact , pretty much the situation

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that unin diagnosed in Imperialism: The Highest S!age of Capitalism . Contrary to Lenin, Nietzsche does not think that finance capitalism and its concomitant nationalism is me source of the great wars of the twentieth century. They are rather a restraining force in themselves. Great wars have: at their origin something else; this is the problem of great politics.

Great Politics

For Nie[Zsche, war is a possible solution to the problems engendered by the brake of nationalism . Just as Greece had its wars, so must Europe now recover in the form of "great politics" those antagonisms that might permit a cultural rebirth. "Nationalism, this nerorose nationale with which Europe is sick , this perpetuation of European political particularism [KJe;nstaaterei J, of small politics [hasl deprived Europe: of its meaning, of its reasons - [has] driven it into a dead-end street. Does anyone beside me know the way out of this dead-end street ... ?"60 The way out is a daring gamble: great politics. Only this might lead ro conditions permining a cultural rebirth. Like most other things for Nietzsche, due to its genealogical structure, great politics ~ins by making things worse , before it might make them different. On one level, then, great politics mc:ans international politics. This reinforces the nationalism characteristic of the modem state and binds people , especially strong creative people, to the state; it thereby furthers the progress of nihilism . For instance, Nietzsche fears that even the youth of nations will be drawn into the vortex of such politics, with as a most dangerous consequence not the cost or the " public hecatombs," but that " the political growth of a nation almost necessarily entails an intellectual impoverishment and lassitude, a diminished capacity for the performance of work which requires great concentration and specialization ." 61 On this level, the balance of power, which Nietzsche sees profiting the stateless men , will be upset. Specifically identified is the " blood and iron" politics of Bismarck. In Nietzsche's view, Bismarck is trying to prevent the spread of individualism - much as Wagner comes to do in Parzival. The judgment of Thomas Schieder is only a little too harsh , perhaps prompted by the fact that monographs must

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make points: "Bismarck is in one word all that against which Nietzsche flung his lightning, which he hated and which he wanted to expose as decadent." 62 Nevertheless, for NietzSche, there is little doubr that in terms of his international system, Bismarck is fighting a rearguard action, which while temporarily preventing unity from coming about, will ultimately favor it. The system must finally dissolve in "the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe - the most terrible, the most questionable. and perhaps the most hopeful of all spectacles .... " The curtain has already risen on Europe. but in an uneven way. for some nations are "ahead" of others. "The sickness of the will is spread unevenly over Europe ; it appears most strongly and most manifold where culture has been at home the longest ... in France . . . . In Russia . .. the strength to will has long been accumulating and stored up; there the will - uncertain whether to be a will to negate or a will to affirm - is waiting to be discharged." 63 Nietzsche's argument is not in favor of individualism per se ; rather, a final transformation away from petty politics will only be possible when all nations in Europe have reached the same far stage of atomistic individualism. It is " the next century," Nietzsche writes, which will " bring the fight for the dominion of the earth , - the compulsion to great politics." 64 Just as with morality, this transforming political change comes about through the search for justification. "The leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it . ... The leveled species requires, as soon as it is attained, justification .... " 65 Nationalism and such developments impede the need for justification by trying to maintain politics at a very low level. On the other hand , conscious of the need for a new "politic well wrought veil," Nietzsche also thinks that the struggle for the dominion of the eilrth must come about at the right time - when a group of new men exists who can put it back together again. Since they will have to anempt "a fundamental artistic and conscious breeding" of the new type of men , 66 the attempts on the part of socialists to rush to the final revolution are particularly dangerous. They want to "set one 's hand to the plow when no one can show us yet the seeds that are afterwards to be sown on broken soil." 67 What is needed first is "a higher species of men which thanks to their preponderance of will, knowledge, riches, and influence will use the democratic Europe

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as their most suiuble and supple instrument to take the destiny of the world in their hands and work on 'men' as artists. Enough ; time is come for us to transfonn all our views on politics." 68 Nietzsche seems to feel a danger in men engaging in the "guilty means" of great politics without philosophers to rebuild the arena; if so the siruarion would only wind up in a worse state. The as~tic priest triumphs in morality only because all other values were lacking; a similar triumph in the social-political sphere by nationalistic and ideological tendencies can possibly speD a common disaster. Each nationalistic state, inevitably beset with the anxiety due to inwardly curned aggressive tendencies , will tend to feel the other states responsible for its discontents. The elimination of the other will then seem to be all that is keeping the world from being peaceful. This is the fallacy that Nietzsche wished to expose when speaking of "liberal optimistic" doctrines ; it follows for nationalistic states also . 69 It is ideological war, a last desperate attempt to link modem slave-morality politics and religion in a now disastrous union, (hat frightens Nietzsche. It is not only inevitable, but men are desperately unprepared for it. "When truth enters into a fight with the lies of the millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of valleys and mountains, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The conlXpt of politics will have entirely been merged with a war of and for minds [Geisterkrieg l ; all power strucrures of the old society will have been exploded - all of them are based on lies ; there will be wars, the like of which have never been yet on earth. " 10 If men engage in the "guilty means" of great politics without philosophers to redraw the horizons, for Nietzsche the situation will wind up being worse . "All attempts made to escape nihilism without rransvaluing all previous values only makes the matter worse ; it brings about its opposite." 7J This seems to be Nietzsche 's second understanding of great politics. It presents both more possibilities and more dangers. Though it can be an attempt to redefine horizons and to escape from the nihilism that pervades the culrure more and more, Nietzsche fears that it will produce only what Hermann Rausching, already a disillusioned ex-Nazi in 1939, calls "The Revolution of Nihilism ." Revolution does not imply for Nietzsche , as it did for Marx , rransvaluation .

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In the end , this is one of the main points of Nietzsche's argument against the moral point of view. In slave morality cultures, one muS[ inevitably judge and rake one's standard in comparison with other peoples. Thus two cultures or politics claiming different moralities will inevitably conflict with each other. The conception of international politics as the Hobbesian war of all against all acquires progressive truth as history moves on ; only in modern times, Nietzsche realizes, has the disappearance of political space betwccn cultures begun to manifest itself in its barbaric fullness. Nietzsche sees the coming period of great wars engendered by nihilism (not by nationalism) as " good " only under one circumstance, if it make possible new forms of life. If it comes without the overdetermination of "new men ," all will be in vain. This in turn implies somcthing about political consciousness. The problem with modem political men is that the realms of their consciousness have expanded so far and so abstractly that politics is no longer a public marter: it is no longer the subject of a common consciousness. As long as men continue to have this kind of problem with consciousness, they are not going to be able to draw the veil of illusion which allowed for great culture over others, let alone over themselves. Hannah Arendt once wrote that " to look upon politics from the realm of truth ... means to take onc's stand outside the political realm ." 12 One must only add that if truth has destroyed itself, the political realm must fall away also. Philosophical truth concerns man in his singularity and is apolitical by nature . On the other hand , politics is necessary for higher culture. Therefore what men need are new artist-philosophers , a new Aeschylus, for it is not possible to solve the problems of consciousness on the social level. For Nietzsche , this is true by definition , as we have seen. If someone could das Sein lieu griinden , to use Heidegger 's phrase, and overcome the problems of self-conscious slave morality , [he foundations for a new culture might be possible. The "solution " as described here looks somewhat like Die Meistersinger without the juvenile self-doubts of Walter, or the occasionally rather tired cyni cism of Sachs. Nietzsche notes a danger in that the age of ideological politics wiII simply go on , more and more destructively, and there will be no creative destruction . This can be no dialectical "negation of a negation " - such produces only priests and nationalism. They are parasites on decadents.

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Politics: Midnight and Midday Nietzsche wishes to launch Europe on an experiment; he finds it to precipitate an inevitable, but perhaps fatal , contest for the domination of the earth which may, just may, have as its consequen~s the emergen~ of a new order of rank and a new culture . He holds that unless the wars thac are necessarily going to be fought in the twentieth century are fought to bring about this new world, nothing, or anything, may happen . The wars will be fought anyhow: the new "veil of Isis" requires philosophy and philosophers and they do not seem to be forthcoming. (The doctrine of ere mal return is designed , though, in Nietzsche 's view, to make philosophy possible once more.) For Nietzsche, almost anything may be possible; the increasing disintegration of society itself creates the preconditions that make new worlds conceivable. Two factors appear especially prominent. 13 Through their mastery of the world men are increasingly able to produce the conditions under which they affect the world . Though Nietzsche does not see this as an unmixed blessing as Hegel did at the end of the Phenomenology , he does see it as a new characteristic of modem times. Secondly, the change occurs in a situation in which society is no longer perceived as its own justification. Men and women can require something else. The required transvaluation is to be achieved by means of the doctrine of eternal rerum . As I understand it, this nmion, the most obscure and difficult in all of Nietzsche's writing , is intended ro make possible the sort of arena that ensured the politics of Attic Greece, and there constituted the soil for what Nietzsche sees as still having been the most mature culture of the West. The full exposition of this teaching must still await the last chapter. However, Hannah Arendt in her major work , The Human Condition, undertakes an exposition of what she believes to be "eternal recurrence, " and a consideration of her notion can provide some preliminary groundclearing for a more complete trearment. The difference between what she means by eternal return and what Nietzsche means are of great use in the determination of Nietzsche 's final position on politics. In Arendt 's view, the cyclical nature of certain political processes manifests itself in their "eternal recurrence" at certain moments in ne~ssary

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the development of any system of relations . For instance, when authority disintegrates - as just before revolution - men reassert a fraternal political bond, which she believes can best be understood by looking to Greek thought for a description. Similarly the present "failure of nerve " in the United States may very well generate a reassert ion of the Tocqucvillean principe which forms the country. This is not the time or place to criticize this view at length. Rather, I simply want to point out that it is very different from that of Nietzsche. H..: simply does not believe that under the growing chaos there is anything eternal that might repeat itself. The crisis extends - this is why it is so profound and its consequences are so potentially radical - to the " infrastructure" itself. In fact , it springs from the nature of the infrastructure. There is literally nothing in the configuration of modern events which might , by recurrence, generate health. For Nietzsche , a society that develops not as its rationale and that therefore does not permit of a nihilistic self-consciousness, must come from , or at least be coequal with , the appearance of men who do not share the ontological problems of the present men and their society. It appears, then , that those commentators who have chosen to ignore Nietzsche's lengthy passages about " breeding" and " race" are ignoring what Nietzsche himself regarded as a central portion of his thought. No positive social doctrine can come out of Nietzsche without such an appreciation . As long as men remain " human-all· too-human ," nothing new will be possible. Nietzsche feels that whatever is done will have to be done over a much longer period than before . As shown above, the increasing democratization of people's relationships makes this possible . " Each natural process of the cultivation of mankind ... which until now was operating slowly and unguidedly could be taken in hand by men ; .. . whole portions of tbe eartb can dedicate themselves to conscious experimen ts." 74 Interestingly enough , this means that Nietzsche thinks the possibilities of guided social change to be far greater in advanced industrial societies - providing only that there are the men to undertake them . Societies less along the path toward democratization - or perhaps escaping from the Western flow altogether - will be less subject to such conscious experimentation. Only two possible examples come to mind in the present: China and Cuba. Neither of them are , however, as much developed along

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involved in the modem political form of nationalism mean that men 's lives get shaped by abstract forces to which they can only react. Since this effectively dominates their lives , true creativity, such as was possible with the strong personal sensuous political life of [he Greeks, is impossible. Never has politics been so important ; but never has it been so remote . For Nietzsche, in opposition to Marx, the solution to this dilemma must [mt be individual, and only then social. Societies no longer have their own revolutions out of their own logic; now history and the dialectic lead only downward.

Chapter VllI THE WILL TO POWER

A p~oplt without history Is nor redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless momena.

- T . S. Eliot , Little Gidding V

We au what we preund to be; tberefore we must be careful about what we preund. - Kun Vonnegur, Jr., Mo ther Night

The will CO power and eternal return traditionaUy represent the greatest stumbling blocks in any interpretation of Nietzsche. Separately, they arc obscure enough ; but their relation to each other leaves most commentators in the embarrassed position of having to make a choice . If the will to power is seen as the most central and important part of Nietzsche, the reader tends to come up with an image of Nietzsche favoring strong individuals who assert themselves almost ruthlessly on an unstructured moral and human environment. Certainly, this is the picture that was common in Europe in the 1920's and still subsists today, in altc=red form , in American understandings. If, on the other hand , eternal return be-

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the path (0 atomistic individualism as many others. They do both have self-conscious rulers and are dedicated to the very Nietzschean proposition of creating "new men ." (One might look below the surface nonsense of the "creative application of the thought of Mao Tse Tung" to understand the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as an epistemo-onwlogical revolution designed to induce in the Chinese people the attitude that nature can be mastered through abstract thought, rather than - as in the Confucian mode - bent before like a reed . What the ultimate outcome of this will be is hard to say. The problem is far more difficult in advanced industrial societies which are in many ways just coming out of the organizational period that China and Cuba are entering. Nevertheless the possibility in these countries should raise similar questions about those in more technological ones.) For Nietzsche , finally, man had much the same situation in politics as in morality. Contemporary developments of the political have made it more abstract and removed from the life of the individual ; this has also happened with morality by the death of God. That which had been a sensuous force is now but a hollow shell. which , however, is kept from breaking in and out of its own logic. In morality, the preserver is the ascetic priest ; in politics, it is nationalism . These residues are now all that is important in governing man's life. The ascetic ideal is, in its totalitarian logic, the only ideal that governs men 's lives. Nationalism is a similar residue in politics and is also the only form of politics; it totally shapes the political life of man . Worst, it prevents new genius - true philosophers - from emergmg. Men are confronted with a startling paradox. In the quote selected for the epigraph to this chapter, Kierkegaard points out that in the future, what will be important for the individual cannot be politics, "for politics is a dialectical relation between the individual and the community in the representative individual ; but in our times the individual is in the process of becoming far too reflective to be able to be satisfied with merely being represented." Yet, at the same time , as Mann puts it, "The destiny of our times manifeS{s itself in political terms." It is as if the two parts of the Aeschylean assertion that character is destiny have been separated by modem political developments . Those forces which shape a man's character no longer have any relation (Q his destiny. The democratization and atomization

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comes the main motif, it is possible to read into Nietzsche a vision of the cosmos which , though absurd, still contains [he basis of order. Such notions are generally retained today by commentators who wish to see Nietzsche as attempting [0 replace the dead God with a new principle of value . This view gives a far more "religious" Nietzsche. The origin of this divergence is not hard to discover, for both schools share an understanding of a contradiction between the will to power with its apparently definite implications of linearity, and the doctrine of eternal return with seemingly equally definite implications of circu larity . If the man of the will to power is constantly to "overcome" himself (accepting for the moment that one understands what this means , and that Nietzsche actually says it) , how might this be reconciled with the notion that the man of eternal return comes back " always the same" (accepting again, as even more surprisingly most commentators do, that one knows what this means and that Nietzsche actually said it, too). In this apparent dilemma, interpreters tend to take which side they want , most American writers showing a very Anglo-Saxon predilection for the bright individualism of the will to power, and most continental writers joyfully embracing the dark fatalism of eternal return . I I intend to show that there is no problem in accepting both the will to power and eternal return . It is not a matter of reconciling them, for, properly understood, they are not in conflict. Indeed it would be surprising for them to be so, since nowhere in Nietzsche's writings, either published or unpublished , does he give the slightest hint that he saw their relationship to be problematic. I shall begin with the will to power, but a few preparatory warnings are necessary. When reading Nietzsche, one must always pay close attention to any inherited preconceptions. A certain amount of self-conscious naivete is probably safe, for, if Nietzsche is in fact doing something new, as he repeatedly claims, it is then dangerous to approach his words and work with old ideas and concepts. For instance , as we have seen, very few people, even among those who would claim some considerable acquaintance with Nietzsche. have managed to see what is plainly said, that Hamlet is the "prototype of the dionysian man." This is without doubt due to the tendency to .see "dionysian" in somewhat wild, sexual, and uncontrolled hues. denoting orgies, debauchery, and what have you. Yet as

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we have seen, this is certainly not Hamlet . Similarly, in the ca~ of the "will to power," we may be tempted to naturally attribute plus signs to the notion of "will," without ever investigating if Nietzsche did the same. Or again, many commentators accept the defmition of eternal return as that "which comes back always the same," as if it were obvious what this mean . But, as has been seen in previous chapters, the hermeneutic promi~ of Nietzsche is that he is never obvious, if only because his readers are unable to look and ~e what he says. A second warning: to take Nietzsche ~riously, it is especially necessary here to assume, for a while at least. that he might make some overall sen~ . He is too aware of the possibility that men will misread him , or think that he has nothing to say,2 for us not at least to credit him with the possibility that even his " big concepts," such as the will to power and eternal return, might be, as he claims [hey are, the central focuses of his doctrine . To accept the possibility that Nietzsche does make sense overall and that even his strangest notions have to be taken seriously requires also that we admit, at least in a preliminary fashion , his own hierarchy of his concepts. Thus, in considering the will to power, i[ is worth remembering that Nietzsche explicitly makes eternal return the centerpiece of his work .) Thus, any interpretation, such as Heidegger 's or Kaufmann's, which tends to make the will to power the fulcrum in Nietzsche 's philosophical achievement , must necessarily go against Nietzsche 's own understanding of himself. This is not to say that Nietzsche could not have been mistaken about himself; [Q suggest as much , however, already raises a whole new ~t of questions. A last reminder deals with the temptation to assume that the book entitled The will to Power is in fact a book about the will to power. I have discussed this to some degree already, but it is worth repeating here that this book is the compilation of various sections of Nietzsche's notebooks of the period 1880-1888, selected and arranged by his editors. Not only does the term " will to power" not appear until 1885 ,4 bU[ any sen~ that the arrangement of these selections makes , and any resonances they seem to acquire by being beside each other on paper are to be radically distrusted. At best , the book serves an indexing function.

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Tbe will alld tbe Problem of the Past

All of this raises a problem for an understanding of the will to power and will raise a similar one for eternal return. Nietzsche never wrote a systematic scrutiny of the question , as he did for instance of morality in 0" tbe Ge1lealogy of Morals. Interpretation is thus difficult. To meet this problem, it is necessary here and in my final chapter to change my approach somewhat. Until now, I have been able to draw from all of Nietzsche 's works and have attempted to puzzle together material to give an understand ing of the coherent thrust of Nietzsche's thought. With the will to power and eternal return this proves impossible. Most of the references to these doctrines are in the unpublished material that Nietzsche was trying to shape into a major philosophical opus, at the end of his life. It is dangerous to work only from a set of citations about which we can have at best only an intuitive feeling of their respective importance . Hence, I have elected to first explicate in detail those portions of the published work that deal with the subject material of these two chapters. If this task is done well, it should then permit at least the outlines of a picture into which other material can be fitted. The main published consideration of the will to power comes in the chapter "On Redemption " in Zaratbustra. A detailed exegesis should cast some light on the complexity of Nietzsche's understanding of the will to power and, in addition, throw some light on how difficult a serious reading of Nietzsche can be; as is often the case, it is nearly impossible to understand the significance of Nietzsche's writing without working through it . As with an aphorism, there is nothing one can do with a chapter in Zarathustra ; it is not a ready-made tool. The parts only acquire the full dramatic meaning when they are understood in the manner in which they unfold . The chapter "On Redemption" opens with a temptation scene. Zarathustra has crossed over " the great bridge" and is surrounded by cripples and beggars. A hunchback begs him to cure each in this multitude of his respective ailment. The episode is a development of the first major scene in the book which also involved masses of people. In the " Prelude," Zarathustra had come to a town and attempted to preach to a crowd , already assemb led to watch the

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performance of a tightrope walker . The multitude had laughed at him . Now, the deformities of the mass, which were once simp ly internal, have acquired physical manifestation ; they are more and more obvious. Zarathustra , too , has learned more: he has crossed over the great bridge symbolizing man, and is moving away from the role of preacher or shepherd of the human-all-too-human. He will no longer attempt to prove to these men that he is to be belie ~d in; mere belief will not be enough , a change in their nature is required . He replies then to the hunchback with a piece of folk wisdom to the effect that such minor deformities as these men have at least give them a self-defi nition which one should not take away. ("When one takes away the hump from the hunchback . one takes away his spirit ... .") Indeed , after this chapter, Zarathustra will talk to no one for the rest of Book Three. In Book Four he only speaks to his fool . and then to the higher men. The temptations to make the world in his own image have disappeared. But there is a greater problem . Worse . far worse than these men are those whom Zarathustra says he used to encounter, Euripidean characters, who have so developed one part of their personality that everything else has fallen away . He found huge ears supported by a tiny stalk . which upon microscopic investigation turned out to be the rest of the man . Such people Nietzsche calls "inverse cripples." the result , one might say. of a tyrannical division of lahor such that the society has forced them to exaggerate one portion of their physical anatomy in its service. These men are the parodistic end products of the effects of the division of labor examined in the previous chapter. The strange and surrealistic introduction to the chapter marks two things. First, Zara[hustra is no longer interested in directly teaching masses of people. As in Nietzsche 's accusation against Socrates. public education , even for those who want it , will simply not do. What Zarathustra has to say can not be understood, there is no common experience between Zarathustra and his audience on this matter. The reason for this is the second important point of this introduction . One will never free people through education. even people who ~ willing to learn . since one cannot therewith free them from their pasts and their genealogy . It is the " now and the past" which Zarathustra finds unendunble . and which he "could not support" unless he also finds a different future to be possible. We ~ thus launched headlong into the problems of dealing with

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one's genealogy and with one's past ; if this were simply psychiatry, I would say that Nietzsche is trying to figure out how to deal with the effect of deep , ongoing structures of neurosis and psychosis. Zarathustra is tempted to redeem the world in his own image, but he rduses to take this burden upon himself. Looking back to the three " metamorphoses of the spirit " in the introductory chapter to the first book of Zaratbustra , we find it apparent that Zarathustra is shifting from the stage of the beast of burden who bears all, to the stage of the willing lion who destroys. Indeed the discussion now shifts to the question and notion of the will. This, then , is a discussion of only the second or willing stage of the spirit. Zarathustra is not the overman , at least not here ; rather he is, as he says, "a cripple at the bridge ." The important recognition that he is a John the Baptist figure or , as Heidegger says, a Fuersprecber, S shows that he is still preparing the way for eternal return . In the previous chapter ("The Soothsayer") he had already rdused a dream interpretation that made him into the overman ; now, here, to make clear why he cannot yet be anything but a " herald ," he enters into a long discussion of the will and willing. This will show that , as a dominant activity , willing is only characteristic of the second state of the spirit, and that, as long as men make it the center of tbeir activity, they will not enter into the final "child" state. "The lion must become a child ," as Zarathustra says in the first speech ; " the will itself to be overcome ," he remarks in a note from the middle 1880's, signifying that as long as one has to overcome and conquer the outside world , one feels constraint and has thus not acquired the new nature of the overman . "All feelings of freedom ," the note continues, are " no longer to be conceived of in opposition to constraint. ,,6 Such considerations are of genealogical impon . Nietzsche now believes that a new form of life , radically different from that of the inverse cripples, will only be possible if the basis of the old form has been destroyed . This precisely is the link to the following discussion of the past. If men are to be redeemed from what they are , they must be redeemed from their past. " Redemption" seems to imply that the past would be abolished , or made not to matter any more . Such is the usual religious view. Nietzsche writes : "To redeem the past and to recreate all 'it was' into 'thus I willed it,' that was first called redemption to me ." 7

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One must proceed very slowly and with circumspection here . It is not clear yet exactly what Nietzsche thinks about redemption as a manner of dealing with the past . It is dear that redemption at least makes the past into a problem. If men are not to be: time's fool , they must do more than simply acknowledge the past (which Hegel , after all, had done brilliantly) ; they must aim, as Nietzsche says at the end of the chapter, " higher than reconciliation." Redemption might be, or so he thinks at first , " recreating all 'it was' into 'thus I willed it' ''; however. he goes on to say: "The will itself is still a prisoner ... ; it cannot will backwards, it cannot break time. and the covetousness of time." As I read this, it indicates that willing is not a process that itself can lead to redemption , since the latter involves breaking the hold of the past, and the will is fatally tied to the movement of time. The will is part of a configuration that has had a pase It cannot break that past without destroying itself, and , since implicit in it are elements of the past by which it came to be, it can never break the past. Should it attempt to, it will merely perpetuate the past ; "it cannot will backwards. " The attempt to deal directly with the past , to tty to annihilate it, is dangerous. If a person or society cannot live with its own nature, the attempt to voice and focus displeasure and anger results in destructive frustration. Nietzsche continues on : "The will , the liberator took to hurting ; and on all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backward. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will's ill will against time and irs 'it was.' .. If the will is turned against the world, it will attempt to destroy boundaries; if turned inward , in an attempt to deny the reality of those boundaries in terms of which one is (who one is) instead of potentially healthy eristic combat , one gets " revenge." In both cases, though, the will is destructive . " I will" is always for Nietzsche a negation of what is; this characteristic presumably is also in some way true of the will to power. If turned inward , the will produces the phenomenon of " revenge"; the implications are important for Nietzsche . If one seeks revenge for something. in th is case, for the harm the past has done to the present, it becomes for Nietzsche, as Heidegger acutely notes, "an attempt to deny time past."s Such an attempt, however, can only be premised on the surmise that there is potentially a value to the whole process; that somehow the past should not have done what it did to

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the present; and that thus we should not be what we are. The attempt to take revenge on the past presumes that one could or should not have acted as one did . Hence, the turning of the will inward also implicitly advocates a certain form of morality . The desire to punish and find redress implies, first of all, a potentially "proper" way to be and behave, and, secondly, an attempt to absolve oneself from what one has become. Taking revenge is an attempt to deny the reality or necessity of one's past, and thus also of one's existence. It becomes a denial of the historicity of a person in favor of a more absolute notion of what that person should be, and thus is cousin to the search for permanence which Nietzsche so often criticizes. The main focus of the chapter "On Redemption" is the problem that the past poses for significant change in the future. Nietzsche is here concerned to investigate how what men have been affects what they are and , perhaps even more importantly, what they might become. His initial indication is that men desire to be redeemed from the past, and thus also from themselves. Nietzsche pursues his line of inquiry in four capsule summaries of the main attempts previous philosophers have made to deal with the problem of the past. Much as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind , though specific individuals are not mentioned by name, it is not hard to pick out who is meant. All of these men represent positions that Nietzsche is at some pains to reject. First come Hegel and Anaximander. Nietzsche writes: "Because there is suffering in those who will , inasmuch as they cannot will backward . willing itself and all life is supposed to be - a punishment. And now cloud upon cloud rolled over the spirit, until eventually madness preached 'Everything passes away ; therefore everything de.serves to pass away .. . . Thus preached madness.''' Hegel, like Anaximander, attempts to solve the problem of transitoriness by locating valuc precisely in the phenomenon of change . Such a solution really avoids dealing with the problem ; as with all dialectical solutions , it presumes a priori that movement is in itself a good and redeeming thing. Anaximander and Hegel are willing to accept the past as a whole on the grounds that whatever was in it was part of human history and that since history was eventually leading to a unity of actuality and potentiality , all of the past must be seen as good . The universal affirmation of the past sees value in the whole process; it

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constitutes saying Yes to aU that has been. For Nietzsche, from such a perspective one must say that whatever discontents are suffered are merely temporary and not world historical. Contrary to this, Nietzsche sees the whole of Western civilization suffering from certain basic and radical defects of an original character, much in the way Freud did. The second view is the as-if fatalism of Kant and Anaxagoras, which Nietzsche renders : "Things are morally ordered according to justice and punishment. Alas where is redemption from the flux of things and from the punishment called existence?" Nietzsche also sees madness in positing an unknowable world which is nevertheless fraught with the characteristics of that which is valued. The~ is again no a priori reason [Q assume the existence of a morally structured universe which allows us to justify and condemn this one. Anaxagoras and Kant fmd an escape from the problem of time in asserting it to be a necessary product of the mind . There is, however, especially in Kant's view, an unknowable but apprehendable world of theoretical reason to which the concepts of human existence might correspond. It is in this world that Kant finds his "redemption." For Nietzsche, however, nothing is gained by what he sees as the invention of an imaginary world which has the categories necessary to do away with the problems of this one. The solmion is JUSt too pat ; the problems of the self-conscious knower are suddenly solved by the discovery of a world not subject to self·consciousness. It is important [Q be quite dear that both Hegel and Kant approach the problem of the past in manners that Nietzsche feels must be rejected as the voice of " madness." Nietzsche now passes to a third conception of time and redemption. "Can there be redemption if there is eternal justice? Alas, the stone 'it was' cannot be rolled ; so must all punishments be eternaL Thus preached madness." This is the cosmic fatalism of Schopenhauer. He conceives of joy as a release whi ch, if effected, is automatically aimed at a negative state. The doctrine is destructive in both its effect and its ultimate aim . Schopenhauer then teaches that there is 00 possibility of creation . Nothingness is all that could be willed . And, indeed, Nietzsche concedes that men may act as if Schopenhauer were right; they may " will the void , rather than be void of wiIL'>9 But, for Nietzsche , this constrained perspective is not the only one possible. The ascetic ideal, which is the originator of this notion. triumphs only because there is no opposition .

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This theme is picked up again in Zaratbustra when Nietzsche speaks of a new tablet " recently found hanging in the marketplace" where it is proclaimed that "wisdom makes weary, worthwhile is nothing; you shaD not desi~ ." 10 Since willing is destructive , if willing is, as Schopenhauer thought, the only alternative to rep~­ sentation, it can only lead to nothingness. In this perspective, there is no choice except annihilation or chaos: in both cases, the world is held to be unalterable in its fundamentals. In Nietzsche's terms , Schopenhauer conceives of the world as a "monstrous man," whose actions are manifest and whose nature is totally unalterable. For Nietzsche, this is simply the result of Schopenhauer taking his own psyche as ultimate and general. This is not totally inaccurate , but it is not necessary . For, Nietzsche notes sardonically, one is not forced to say that "the world is Schopenhauer writ large .... " 11 As Jean Granier remarks, Schopenhauer's conception of the will remains " fatally aporetic, " 12 self-contradictory in that it remains tied to " the old thing in itself" and to the phenomenon . Schopenhauer, in Nietzsche's understanding, commits a basic error in not seeing that "desiring (the 'will') is only a manner of knowing and nothing else." 13 What Schopenhauer has done is replace the transcendental world of Kant with an empty world of nothingness ; but the structure of the approach is not thereby changed. That the ultimate reference of one's actions be nothingness (as a transcendental quality) rather than the realm of theoretical reason may depress men; it does not mean that they approach problems differently. If Schopenhauer's doctrine leads inevitably toward nothingness, it does not follow that willing nothingness will release men from an epistemology that drives them constantly toward an ever vanishing goaL When Nietzsche proclaims that man would tather ' 'will the void, than be void of will " he is making an anti-Scbopenhauerian statement. He is suggesting that the state that Schopenbauer thought to be the logical result of his investigations (being "void of will") is simply not attainable . The problem of humankind is therefore not to be approached by willing something new, but by changing the fonn of life that requires willing. As an attempt to change the world, willing leads, it seems, to a blind alley. Hence, one would suspect that for Nietzsche, the forms of life which might require willing will have to be changed. The "lion" will have to become a "child. " Even in the ultimate development of Western morality - nihi-

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tutored , would vastly enhance the quality of the Gu ild . Thus we are confronted with a problem analogous [0 that of Greek tragedy. Sachs must solve the old with the new, such that the city of Niirnberg be renewed and rejuvenated . Sachs achieves this integration by teaching Walter so me of the rudiments of form and manipu lating the social net of illusion in such a fashion that the young artist finds fulfillment and the society is renewed . In the fa mo us Wahn monologue at the beginning of Act Ill , Sachs self-consciously sets himself this task : Now le:I us see: How Hans Sachs works To cunningl y guide: illusion So to do a noble: work. Thus it is with such affairs, They rarel y work o f themselves And never without illusion.

The Meistersi'lger solution - for Sachs weaves his fi nery well holds that one need not overcome the past in order to be redeemed . If there is someone in the position of a Sachs, all may, in the end , work out . This, however, manages well enough to end the opera, but it does nor solve the problem of " redemption of the redeemer. " Even Wagner recognizes the artificiality of this solution when , just as Sachs places the chain of acceptance into the Meister Guild over the head of the young Walter. the new Meistersinger exclaims: NOI Meister! No ! I wo uld be blessed wilhoul Meislerhood.

Art here remains the basic pattern of redemption for Wagner , but the degree of self=consciousness required for successful manipu lation is such that the attained result is always seen as problematic. In the opera, Walter is immediately hushed by Sachs (for one: thing, the: production has been going for five hours), and the problem is postponed with an expression of confidence in Ge rman art. 8m the point is clear: to know what you are doing somehow threatens the "naturalness" of the results. Walter instinctively wants to be blessed , but witho ut having to be taught. In other words , he wants to be redeemed from the past simply by not having it and by not having to deal with it. As with Nietzsche , the option of direct didactic teaching

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lism - men persist through their will in giving form to a repeated development of the structures in which they already exist. Will may be destructive of conunt, but not necessarily of form ; and , in some conditions, such as those of morality. it merely perpetuates the intentionality of the wiDer_ Nietzsche is thus able to say that a pure act - that is , an act leading to no consciously or unconsciously unintended results - can only be an " unconscious one" ; in fact , "all perfect acts are unconscious and no longer willed ." 14 He does not imply by this, however, that just any " unconscious" will do. As we shall see in the final chapter, Nietzsche believes that there are many differently structured forms of the " unconscious": the problem is to discover how to acquire one that is not nihilistic. In any case, the next capsule in "On Redemption" appropriately concerns Wagner, who. in his libreni and music, wrestles at length with the thorny problem of the relation of conscious and unconscious acts. Nietzsche has him say: "No deed can be annihilated: how could it be undone by punishment, this is the eternal in the punishment called existence (Dasein1 - that existence also again must be deed and guilt. It happens then that the will at last redeems itself and will becomes non-will. . .. But, my brothers, you know this fable of madness." Wagner recognizes that .selfconsciousness (knowing what you will) poses a problem for redemption . It is on his solution to this problem that Nietzsche ultimately breaks with Wagner. Wagner's answer is then worth developing at some length , for it casts light on what particularly offends Nietzsche . In Lohengrin , the hero explicidy enjoins Elsa from seeking to know who he is. Das sollst du mich nicht fragen - "That you must not ask me" - is the motif most repeated in libretto and music. When the fatal question of consciousness is asked , all comes to an end , and the would-be redeemer must sail back to the "distant land , named Monsalvat. " To depend on the restraint of humans will clearly not work . In Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, IS Wagner attempts to solve the problems of the young untutored genius Walter von Soltzing. Walter wants to attain happiness in the form of marriage to Eva ; to do this he must obtain admission into the Meister Guild . Since his first song lacks all rudiments of form - even though sung from the heart - he is rejected by the guild . It is obvious that Wagner and the benevolent cobbler Sachs feel that this new artist, if properly

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is rejected , but, in Wagner's understanding , self-consciousness must also be abolished. These problems are taken up in the Ring tetralogy. In order to save the world from the domination of the power of the ring , Wotan has to break his own laws. The whole situation can only be redeemed from this disaster-provoking act by the actions of a man who is not subject to the past. Siegfried, who, as Anna Russell has savagely pointed out, is "very brave and very strong, and very handsome, and very stupid" is the redemptive hero. He is of unnatural birth, never knows his father, and constantly loses memory of what little experience he has by imbibing magic draughts. Yet he is, as Wotan tells Fricka in the first scene of the second act of Die Walkiire, ... aman Who, free from godly prou~ction Is free from the laws of me gods. Only such can accomplish the deed Which though gods would perform it No god dare perform it for hiITl5df.

Instead of actively manipulating the web, as does Sachs in Die Meistersinger, Wotan must enforce forbearance on the pan of all other gods. Since this counteracts Brunhilde's natural and active love for Siegfried, the solution achieved also suffers from anificialicy and self-consciousness. Wagner does not advance far beyond the dilemmas of Meistersinger. It is not until Parzivai, the opera occasioning the final and public break between Nietzsche and Wagner, that one finds Wagner's ultimate solution . Here, at last, the opera explicidy ends with " redemption for the redeemer." Parzival is the " pure fool," an unconscious bumbling artist who finds the Grail and redeems everything and everyone because he does not know who he is, where he comes from , or what he is doing. Even the erotic kiss from Kundry is transfonned into an affinnation of the chastity of innocence . This is simply unacceptable to Nietzsche. That the solution to the problems of the world should depend on me sudden appearance of a man who has remained totally outside the world and that his unthinking action should aUow the world's redemption as well as his own was sociologically too implausible. In the early Wagner, at least , some active hope had been offered in the notion of an artistic

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redemption . Nietzsche now s«s this too as mistaken. But the Wagner of Parzival is simply unbearable. Nietzsche caustically suggests that what is required after Wagner's last opera is "redemption from the redeemer. " 16 In the end, Wagner is merely non-rigorous Schopenhauer. 17 The notion that the will itself has to be redeemed implies that existence itself is a crime which must be expiated , for from which one must be rescued. The search for redemption , in the sense of finding a way to escape from the past, is then precisely what Nietzsche moves away from in his capsule summaries of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. So far, Nietzsche has considered the answers of three other philosophers, as well as that of an artist. In a real sense, these represent the positions he encounters during his years of schooling. Determined as he is to " become who he is, " he feels obliged to move away from these positions and these men . During the period of Human, AIlToo-Human , when the necessity of breaking with Wagner becomes evident to him, he notes : When I te1ebrated Schopenhauer as my educator, I had forgotten that already. for quite awhile, none of his dogmas had escaped my misgivings ; I was not bothered, though. by how often I had written "badly proved" or "indemonstr:lble" or " overstated" under his sentences. I was only thankful for the great impact which Schopenhauer, free and bold before the world [di!!' Ding!!' J, in confrontation with the world, had exercised upon me for a decade. When, later, on a festive occasion, I brought my vem:r.uion to Richard Wagner. once again I had forgotten that for me his only music was shrunk to some one hundred measures taken here and there, ... and ... that I had forgonen what I knew about Wagner in respect to the truth.l 8

In Ecce Homo , Nietzsche insists in an almost pathetic fashion that one may legitimately substitute his name for those of Wagner and Schopenhauer throughout the Untimely Considerations without fundamentally changing the impact. Such a rejection of what had appeared to him, at least for awhile, as authority leads to the final capsule in this chapter "On Redemption." The Jast rejected alternative solution to the problem of the relation of the win and the past is the one that he himself advanced (or appeared to) in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche writes : "{ led you away from all these fables when I taught you 'the will is a creator.' All 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident - until the creative will says to i[ 'But

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thus I willed il. ' ... 8m has the will spoken thus? And when will that happen?" The B;rth of Tragedy points in the right direction , but it does not provide th~ right answer. The will can only "speak thus" when there is " reconciliation with time, " and "something higher chan reconciliation ," only when the " will is taught to will backward ." This last will is the will to power. What does it mean that the will to power must will " higher than reconciliation? " Interpretation of this whole passage calls for extreme caution ; indeed , at this point Zarathustra breaks off his speech and has an exchange with the hunchback , who is upset that Zarathunra has spoken differently to them chan to his disciples. Zarathustra retorts that with hunchbacks , one speaks in a "hunchback'ed " fashion. His interlocutor does not rest content, though : "Why does Zarathunra speak differently to his students, than to himself?" And , with that, the exchange is cut off; for a long time Zarathustra will engage in no conversation with anyone. In che midst of these difficulties, Zarathustra seems to be saying that the standard notion of redemption attained through an act of will which comes to terms with , or simply eliminates, the past, is unsatisfactory . The previous attempts, by Hegel , Kant, Schopenhauer , Wagner, and even in The Birth of Tragedy , are all deficient in that they either permit an attempt to ignore the weight of the past, or else simply assert the possibility of escaping from it . For Nietzsche , these older conceptions of will are all mistaken ; they "do not exist at all, " for " instead of grasping the formulation of a single willing into many forms, [in them) one eliminates the character of willing by subtracting from the will its content, its 'Whither?' " 19 So far , Nietzsche has argued that the past weighs on the living so pervasively that there seems to be no way in which men may be rid of it. Willing merely reaffirms the past. At the end of the chapter "On Redemption ," Nietzsche drops a hint that a " will which is the will to power" might possibly be able to will backward and thus overcome the power of time. To determine precisely what this means, it is now necessary to break away from this chapter in Zaratbustra - continually keeping in mind the topics that a discussion of the will naturally raised here for Nietzsche - in order to [urn to some of his late notes. The combination permits, I think, a fairly precise understanding of what Nietzsche means by the will to power, and this, in tum, will allow me to make precise the message of this chapter.

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Nietzsche constantly refers to the will to power as something that cannot be satisfied. It requires, he writes , a " whither" in order to be what it is. He sees it as a "forward thrust again and again and becoming master over that which stands in its way. " 20 He indicates mat the will to power is in constant motion against what it is not ; it does not seek any particular state of affairs, but rather control of all that it encounters. 21 Pleasure , pain, and such are seen as superficial manifestations of the drive of life itself which , for Nietzsche, is the attempt to give one 's characteristic definition to that which is encountered. Nietzsche proposes, in fact , a SOrt of eidetic reduction of all that is phenomenal (such as pain and pleasure), so that there remain " no things, but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta : their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their 'working ' IWirken 1 on these. The will to power not a being /Sein} , not a becoming. but rather a pathos is the most elemental fa ct from which a becoming, a working first emerge. "22 This is not the dearest writing that Nietzsche ever undertook. Nevermeless . an importam clue is offered by his reference to me will to power as a pathos. In The Gay Science , Nietzsche makes the classical distinction of pathos and etbos, and suggests that as long as men continue in a particular form of life they tend to think of it as ethos , that is, as the "only possible and reasonable thing ... henceforth." A truer understanding, though , would be that life is patbos, that it is "not one's lot to have (certain particular) sensations for years." 23 Nietzsche's point appears to be that life is a process always happening, such that particular states of affairs and feelings must be epiphenomenal to something else, here pathos, and, in general , to the will to power. Liddell and Scott 's authoritative Greek Lexicon offers more dues. Pathos can mean " that which happens to a person or a thing," what "one has experienced , good or bad "; it refers sometimes to the " incidents of things." In no case does it imply a notion of change or growth, but only me differem states a person or a thing may assume. It is thus quite different, for instance, from the notion of pbysis which Heidegger tries to associate with the will to power. Pby sis is a term denoting origin, or the natural form of a person or thing as the result of growth, occasionally even the regular order of nature. 24 The will to power refers then not to an ontological principle, nor to someming that has evolved ; "it cannot have become," says Nietz-

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sche. 2S It is ratber tbe mOflement itself, and thus has neither being, nor becoming. It can only be understood in terms of its " whither." Nietzsche is saying that if one looks at a people, in fact at organisms and matter in general,26 their most basic characteristic is the attempt to incorporate into themselves and deflJle aU that they meet. This is their will to power, which must therefore be a matter of constantly giving form , or, more precisely, of giving one's own particular form to that which is encountered. All the forms a thing acquires constitute its patbos, its will to power . The various " whithers" are only manifestations which, in their totality, are the will to power of an organism . It is thus correct to proclaim as Nietzsche does in one of his most famous aphorisms, that " all life is 'will to power.' ,,27 Nietzsche 's emphases are constantly on the constructing nature of the will to power. Here the English language tends to obscure an important point. In German , " will to power" is Wille zur Macht. Macht however is related to machen . which means "to make, " and thus to give form. I suggest then that one must understand the will to power as that which gi'X:s the forms which are the patbos of any life. Even more simply, in the notion of the will to power is the answer to the never asked question , Wbat is tbe apollonian? Apollo was the god of form who was required to refract dionysian knowledge. It was he who gave it particular form and thus made a particular culture , society, art, religion, politics, even language possible . Nietzsche uses the norion of the " will to power" in order to assert that any range of forms is possible. Just as Dionysos can be embodied in any number of forms , so also, for example , most Western moral configurations may be seen as partaking of the same genealogy. The dionysian genealogical knowledge is embodied in each morality , but in very different ways.

The Inescapability of the Will With this understanding, significant modifications in the usual view of the will to power become necessary . It is obvious that all forms of life have it, from the most masterly moral, to the most slavish. The will to power is the process of the domination by each of these forms of life. Nietzsche writes : " The will to power interprets (- it is a question of interpretation during the building of an organ) : it sets

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limits, defines degrees, differences of power. Mere differences of power could not feel themselves to be such: there must be present something that wants to grow, which interprets by its standard [auf seinen Wert hin] any other thing which wants to grow. Equal in that - in fact , interpretation is a means to become master of something."zs The will to power " interprets"; it is, as Nietzsche notes in the second essay of The Genealogy of Morals , a "form giving ... force" 29 and it interprets in terms of something. Most generally, the will to power interprets the " new in the forms of the old ." 30 A living organism tends then to attempt to organize the world around it in its own image and to make it part of the sphere of its domination . I have examined how Nietzsche sees this process at work in language, morality , politics; it should now be apparent why there is no escape from a genealogy . The will to power operates in such a manner that the same forms get I"(:peated , in a compelling cycle. Even the nihilist wills , though he perpetuates the void which is the kernel of his will to power. II If this understanding be admitted, it should follow that there are potentiaUy a number of different and alternate genealogical principles. Nietzsche has at least two : !llaster morality and slave morality . (There is also that of the overman, which I shall investigate in the next chapter.) This realization however allows a conclusion that was not possible at the end of my analysis of the chapter "On Redemption." It had appeared there that the will tbat is the will to power caPl possibly somehow deal with the past , and can somehow do so in a manner such that the here and now will no longer suffer from " historical sickness." It is not true, however, that the will to power necessarily does this; certainly the will to power of slave morality and the ascetic priest do not liberate men from this malady . Hence, the will to power does not automatically, by virtue of its " nature, " transform every " 'it was' into 'thus I willed it.''' Zarathustra's conclusion does, however, raise the possibility that if one understands that the will to power operates, and what the nature of the genealogy of present western society is, then it might be possible to make a past, for oneself and for others, which would produce a present not subject to the ravages of nihilism. Such a process would be strongly analogous to the achievements of certain forms of psychoanalysis, except that Nietzsche would have the results on biological, social, and historical levels as well as on the individual. In

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psychoanalysis one first destroys the present, problematic structures of a neurotic personality, and only then constructs that personality that would be healthy. There is a sense in which it is right to say that psychoanalysis seeks to eliminate a portion of a patient 's past and repla Par..it'(ll. fl, ilQ.

~1.

HO

Ring rltr Nibtlungrn, Dtr. 2Jll Trislan und lso/th. 1ffi

m

War, ix. li, 198 200, ~ in limes to come. ix; uses of, 149 ISO. ~ and nihilism, ill Wanofsky. Marx. !1i. 1H Wcber. Max , I.L li.. !l..lt.?1, ~ IQL !2Q, HI. !QQ, 1M. ;!M, 16l

m

m

Polilics as aVoca/ion, 21 Protestant £fhic and fix Spirit , Capital. ism, TIx, !..2Q. ill S«ioI Prytbology of World Rtligions, 212 Wein. !:L DQ, ill Weldon, T. D .• ~ ill Whorf. Benjamin Lee, 122diO. Wikse. John. ill Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, Ulri(:h \·on. 34-.35, 139, 326, H6 Wilcox. John T ., .l6.1 Will, ~ i l l ~ and past. 223U±; and re\'enge, D.i; in Hegel. 225ll.Q.; in Kant, llQ;. in Schopenhauer. 226 228: in Wagner, 229 2}1; in Birth ,Trugrdy. 23 1 232; and nihilism. lli. S« aislJ Redemption; Will to power Williams. William D., illL .illS Will to powcr, xi. 1:i.. 218-259, ~ Jill..; :aim of. UI; defi ned. lii; as pathos, ~ HI. liZ.; not as

m

m. m

392 J

INDEX

Will to power (COft/jnueJ) physis. lll.. llZ.; and put. 234-237; Ind nihilism, and slave monlity,

m

245 259; limits on, ZJL S« a1stJ Apol. Ionian: Ascetic ideal; Ascetic priesl; Nihilism WlfICh, PetCT, 1M

Winckelmann, Jotunnj. . 15-36. U2 Withering. Stt Extirpation

m.

Wittgmstein, Ludwig. f. Z. !.B. li... 26,27 , H , 45. 50. 51, H. H , 59, &. 78-86. ~ !..Qi. Ui. !1Q. liiQ.

m m... m

UL !M. ll1.. ilL

ll2. lll. J 12 J H. !H. ll6.. M!l. 116 Wolin, Sheldon S., !2!.. !fi. ~ .H8. World War !... 2D Yeats, William B. , i l Zararhum'S, ill; and last men, x; and hermit • .UUi and leaching, !1i; and ludience, 221- 222; BOt o\'ennan . ll1.; aurion of, in speech, m problem of, lll.. 2.82 Zeno, 118